Word: defective
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mind's Eye. If Twain the patriot was a cultural absolutist, Henry James the expatriate was a cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
Love-Affair. If Twain suffered from a certain crudity of sensibility, James's defect was overrefinement. His pinnacles of taste sometimes seem like parodies of it. In one such solemn-silly moment, James gravely agreed with a British friend that a certain garden at Cambridge University was "the most beautiful small garden in Europe." James loved the undistinguished quick rather less than the illustrious dead; nowhere in his travel accounts was there a jot of sympathetic indignation about the plight of Europe's poor and humble; Twain's letters are aflame with...
...Huxley stories in the collection bring out the spite without heat that is his peculiar intellectual climate. If there is one central virtue in his art it is that his creatures have the capacity to explain themselves: the central defect is that they have the compulsion to explain themselves away. Huxley rarely creates a character that he does not destroy...
...Forster, Columbia's Dr. H. Houston Merritt, and Walter Reed's Lieut. Colonel Roy E. Clausen Jr. They ordered an electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram, spent 65 minutes studying the results and checking their patient. Verdict at tests' end: the President was completely recovered from the stroke; the defect in his speech had disappeared. Thereupon Walter Reed's most famed patient drove back to the White House, faced a load of work that was piling up between diplomatic summits and economic valleys...
...with individual missiles dispersed to the point that an enemy five-megaton hit on the installation would theoretically take out no more than one Minuteman missile. Each missile will be countdown-ready at all times, will be hooked up electronically to the underground battery command post so that any defect can be spotted. If a red sensing-light flashes trouble, the sick missiles will be removed, replaced at once and repaired at a specially built factory not more than 500 miles away...