Word: words
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Admiral Graf Spee, pocket battleship, 10,000 tons, last word in naval power for its size, was ready. But not for what happened next...
Since the war began, Paris correspondents of U. S. newspapers have been predicting a big German offensive with agonizing regularity. This is not merely wishful thinking by writers weary of stretching a 50-word communique into a column, but is a reflection of the edginess of the average Frenchman, who thought a real war would end the war of nerves. Last week dispatches to the U. S. were again full of ominous signs: unusually large forces had been spotted across the Moselle from Luxembourg; a cold snap had frozen flooded areas in The Netherlands, making a mechanized offensive possible; Germans...
Famed for her parties was the late Mrs. Alexander Hamilton Rice. Until she dropped dead two years ago while shopping in Paris, her tennis-week ball was the No. 1 social event of the Newport season. Lavish was the word for her entertainments at her other mansions in Palm Beach, Paris, Manhattan. But in one of her Manhattan drawing rooms Mrs. Rice never dared to give a party. Reason: she feared for its furnishings, all 18th-Century French, valued at about...
...swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives...
Network programs going over 175 stations were cut off; programs on the NBC international short-wave stations (WNBI and WRCA) were silenced. Then Jimmy's voice, without a splutter or a wasted word, told the world: "We have just seen the Graf Spee explode five miles off the coast: the ship has been scuttled...