Word: worming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...degradation of the modern spirit: "Our one preoccupation is to be safe. We don't know what we love, or if we do we don't dare mention it. We are willing to become anything, to be turned into any sort of worm, by the will of the majority. We are afraid of starving, of standing alone; above all we are afraid of having to fight. And when nevertheless we are forced to fight, we do so without chivalry. We do not talk of justice, but of interests...
...scandal. It portrays in particular the Mitchell family-a brilliant, middle-aged publisher (Paul McGrath), his selfish daughter, his muddled son, and his wife Laura (Dorothy Stickney), who is clumsy and crushed in a world at once beyond and beneath her. But Laura ends up a kind of worm who turns and, when her family come to grief, becomes its strongest member...
Temple, but tap-dancing never interested Maria. At six, she was up on her toes, dancing to The Stars & Stripes Forever. Soon after, swathed in her mother's remodeled peach satin and ostrich feather negligée, she made a solo debut as the Glow Worm. Unlike a lot of other dancing moppets who never get beyond the Glow Worm stage, Maria and her younger sister Marjorie (now a principal dancer in the Marques de Cuevas Grand Ballet) stuck to their toe shoes...
After a year of chasing gamblers, chiselers, unusually wealthy police officers and other curious creatures out of the worm; eaten woodwork of the nation's largest city, a New York City grand jury last week sent out a call for reinforcements. The jurors proposed a crime commission of distinguished citizens, to be financed by public contributions. Its job: to keep an eye on officials charged with preventing crime, holler long & loud if they fall down...
Chairman of the committee and center of the novel is Thomas Armitage, a 75-year-old manufacturer who has learned his benevolence in the school of 19th Century liberalism. Counterposed to him is Sir Charles Considine, a finagler who is trying to worm his way into Armitage's business. Sir Charles thrives under the Labor government's program for organizing benevolence from WhitehallSir Charles knows his way around a bureaucracy. But Armitage feels obsolete. "All now was duty, nothing was love," Author Bentley has him reflect. "He was called vermin by a Cabinet Minister and told...