Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...philosophers and historians, who have variously placed the blame on wars, epidemics, social inequalities, indolence and overambition. More recently, specialists from other disciplines have taken their turn at scrutinizing Rome's downfall. A few years ago, a sociologist suggested that the empire had withered away after its upper classes died off from lead poisoning caused by lead-lined drinking and cooking vessels. Now a geochemist has concluded that Rome's troubles derived largely from the loss of its supply of silver, which fatally disrupted the Roman monetary system...
...Riskin was ordained and began teaching at a special branch of Yeshiva University for Jews with little religious education. Soon Yeshiva had a side job for him, as minister to a tiny Conservative congregation whose dozen or so members met only for the High Holy Days in an upper West Side hotel room. Riskin accepted for a six-month trial period after setting three conditions: 1) he would hold weekly services and weekly classes on Jewish law, 2) he would accept no salary, and 3) the congregation must drop "Conservative" from its name...
Though the same team has given us two other films dealing luxuriously with upper-class rot (The Servant and Accident), The Go-Between begins with images and words which suggest that tired tricks are abandoned, and that Losey and Pinter have put a novelistic concentration of characterization and detail on the screen. The credits are projected against a raindropped windowpane: we see glimpses of green foliage and a manor-like brown blur. A pitted voice speaks: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there...
...revolt, one guard, William Quinn, 28, was severely injured; some observers said that they saw his body fall from an upper floor. The first day, convicts released Quinn and 11 other guards and civilians so that they could get medical help. After being stripped, the remaining guards were given inmate clothing, blankets and even mattresses (which convicts in the rain-soaked yard did not have) to sleep on. Guard Phillip Watkins, 33, said that convicts at first kicked him and broke his arm. But another prisoner called them off. Later he was addressed as "sir," given cigarettes, hot meals...
...Greene's case, the problem was quadrupled because his Church of England father was headmaster of the Berkhamsted School, where Greene went, and that, he recalls, made him feel like a perpetual "Quisling." By his own account he was surrounded by a busy, broad-gauged, reasonably happy upper-middle-class family life. Yet he seems to have been born-and long remained-constitutionally terrified of a remarkable number of things: of bleeding, drowning and burning, even of moths and horses. Disarmingly, he later also admits that even now he never starts any book without acute fear that he will...