Word: mccrum
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...play inspired by his creations: the dim but affable Bertie Wooster, his long-suffering gentleman's gentleman Jeeves and their screwball cohorts at Blandings Castle and the Drones Club. So rich is Wodehouse's legacy that it is difficult to understand why he almost destroyed it. As Robert McCrum recounts in his exhaustive, elegantly written Wodehouse: A Life (Viking; 530 pages), the author was at the peak of his popularity when, in 1941, he made a series of wartime broadcasts for the Nazis while interned in Germany. He was not coerced, but he clearly misjudged the seriousness of his action...
...After a stream of popular stories about well-born wastrels, among them Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse introduced a valet named Jeeves. He paired the two to solve plot problems in The Man With Two Left Feet (1917), and the rest is history. To the many theories about the characters' origins, McCrum insightfully adds: "The cunning servant?foolish master has been a staple of comedy since classical times, and Wodehouse certainly knew his Plautus and his Terence." By the 1920s, magazines like Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post would pay up to $35,000 to serialize a Wodehouse novel. At the dawn...
...been stoutly defended by most old boys and criticized by sensitive souls like Poet Shelley and others as "brutal and degrading," Eton has decided to drop fagging. The practice will be banned as of July, when the current school term ends. The decision was taken by outgoing Headmaster Michael McCrum, 55, who explains: "I am not in favor of self-indulgence of this sort...
During his ten years as headmaster McCrum nudged ten of Eton's 25 independent houses into giving up fagging voluntarily. But the rest refused. Among pupils and old boys, fagging remains popular. Indeed, ex-fags point to benefits from fagging. "You learn how to command by learning how to obey," says one Old Etonian. Beyond that, a good senior, or "fag master," helps new boys find their way around the complex campus and sometimes becomes a lifelong friend. Recalls Sir John Hogg, 62, chairman of the Old Etonian Association: "I had an extraordinarily good fellow...
...gutter with that guy"), Congress approved most of Ike's massive legislative program in 1954. In 1955 Congress was Democratic-and the Eisenhower program again met with a large measure of success. Then came the September night in Denver when Mamie Eisenhower called Dr. Howard McCrum Snyder to her husband's bedside...