Word: yarding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life is the novelist's first draft. This elementary fact periodically brings out the detective in some critics and biographers. Treating a book as a case to be solved, the literary sleuth scours the author's life for telltale clues. With the instincts of Scotland Yard's finest, George D. Painter, a curator of the British Museum, has now tackled the massive Proust case. His findings may strike some readers as anticlimactic. It appears that Marcel Proust based Remembrance of Things Past on his remembrance of things past...
Last week, financed by the enterprising German weekly Der Stern, a seven-man team of frogmen, equipped with an underwater TV camera, successfully brought up from the depths of Toplitz Lake 300,000 phony pounds in good condition, the first of an estimated ?16 million believed hidden there. Scotland Yard only yawned: the British long ago had changed the design of their ?5 and ?10 notes. Just to be safe, Austrian police decided to destroy all the notes they could find...
...same key, and he kept one hidden on his person. Others could be opened by rapping them on a hard surface; so when he challenged an audience to put him in cuffs, there was always a convenient piece of metal strapped to his thigh. When he conned Scotland Yard detectives into trying their "darbies" (handcuffs), they locked Houdini's arms around a stone pillar and left him to suffer. The great escapist simply banged the darbies on the pillar and walked...
...produced a small, coiled-spring saw and a can opener to cut through the zinc floor of his cage; they were passed to him, mouth to mouth, when his wife kissed him in tearful "farewell" before the carette was hidden in the corner of the prison yard. Doctors who examined him later did not find the "gaffs." An old carny hand had taught Houdini the trick of retroperistal-sis-swallowing small objects, stopping them halfway down the esophagus and spitting them up at leisure...
...that connected Urk to the mainland, and the 20th century began catching up with Urkers, especially the younger ones. Traditions began to change, especially the pleasant one of "public cuddling," in which young lovers hugged and squeezed each other on Friday and Saturday nights in Urk's 40O-yard-long main street, while around them a circle of shouting and laughing boys and girls teased the lovers ("Afterward," said one traditionalist, "the brides were properly led to the altar...