Word: britannias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...eyelids and acute satyriasis. Charlie uses jail the way some men use their country clubs-to make valuable contacts. Though he is a petty criminal, Charlie contrives to rub shoulders with the larcenist laureate of England, an elegant superpatriot of a prisoner known only as Mr. Bridger (Noel Coward). Britannia waives the rules for Bridger, who affects Savile Row threads, dines alone, and stabilizes sterling by masterminding foreign robberies from his cell...
...relic, really, of a classic blunder. Perdomita Britannia et statim omissa, noted Tacitus scornfully-"Britain was conquered and then thrown away." He blamed the Emperor Domitian, who in A.D. 84 suddenly ordered his brilliant field commander Agricola to return to Rome just when a wholly Roman Britain seemed within grasp of the legions. Thereafter, year by year, the troops that had pressed nearly to the top of Scotland fell back under guerrilla attacks from the Britons. At last, in A.D. 119, Rome decided to stem the retreat and make the best of things by building a wall...
...copper came from Cyprus, the tin from far-off Britannia, and the Greeks wrought the ensuing alloy, bronze, in myriad forms: vases, swords, tripods, safety pins, mirrors, votive statuettes, household icons and colossal public statues. Most of the large statues have been lost, broken up or melted down, but thousands of graceful hand-sized household objects and prized miniatures remain. Though fragmented and stained with the crusts, scars and patina of age, they nonetheless offer spirited insights into classical days and ways...
...malice is tangibly thick: "Her heavy amber earrings and amber necklace, her dyed black hair done in earphones so dead and scurfy that one felt that if they were lifted moths would fly out of them, her dreadful arch smile . . ." Are such caricatures intended to portray poor old Britannia? The tone is wrong for a grand historical novel; the sound is not of a foundering vessel but of rats in the stores and cordage...
Jampacked G.l.s. Designed as a tandem team for providing weekly passenger service across the North Atlantic, the Queens were the culmination of a dream born in 1840 when Samuel Cunard's Britannia became the first regularly scheduled transatlantic liner. At the time that the 80,000-ton Queen Mary made her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in May 1936, only the French Line's Normandie could rival her for size and speed.* Within six months, work was underway on her even bigger sister ship, the 83,000-ton Queen Elizabeth, whose maiden trip to New York...