Word: whims
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Whim of Iron. Porter's life story has another deficiency as a movie plot. His 1919 Paris marriage to a wealthy beauty, Linda Lee Thomas, has been placid, childless, fashionable-and free of both the romantic hubbub and the folksiness that Hollywood prefers in its patterned fictions. Intimates describe the Porters as "great, devoted friends." They live on the 41st floor of Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, and from time to time share the mirrored elegance of his California summer place in Brentwood (complete with a swimming pool that lights up at night), or her luxurious house in Williamstown...
...creature imaginable, addicted to listening at keyholes and cutting up flies. It seems a weakness on Cocteau's part to have chosen a freak to personify the evil in the world. But perhaps the choice does not spring so much from Cocteau's philosophy as from a mere theatrical whim. It is just such flaws, and not his experimental miscarriages, which keep Cocteau from getting one of out Genuine Genius Awards which are passed out so frequently these days...
What makes the plan utopian is in truth nothing more than that it is a plan. It would substitute for the haphazard standard of Harvard's instruction methods, allowed to exist by accident or whim or unfortified tradition, a policy. The policy would be a standard to which no course would have to conform but which would be there as a guide, a stimulus away from haphazardness and toward an ideal...
With a thousand-odd Freshmen to juggle into sections, the English Department cannot cater to every man's pet whim. Prior preparation of the Veteran's Book list further limits the possible materials and the section man, having already planned his course, cannot effectively arbitrate at the last minute. But neither can a student effectively work in a field foreign to his bent, to which he is arbitrarily assigned. His literary acquaintance may be broadened but not his interests; and with no participation in the selection, his education suffers...
...Arts loudly disapproved the scheme, declaring that it would "permanently change the appearance of the south façade."* Pennsylvania's Congressman-Architect Frederick Muhlenberg rose to declare that the White House "was a heritage of the American people, not lightly or casually to be altered at the whim of any tenant." Indignant letters poured in to the Washington papers; cartoonists lampooned the plan. Crumped the New York Herald Tribune: " 'Back-porch Harry' is scarcely an appellation that a man would like to carry into a presidential campaign, even if he were impervious to the odium...