Snippets

It seems strange to relate now, but in 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover (D H Lawrence) was a book at the centre of an indecency trial at the Old Bailey in London.
Gerald Gardiner (Harrow, Magdalene College Oxford, later Lord Chancellor in a Labour Government was the Defence. Mervyn Griffith-Jones (Eton, Trinity Hall Cambridge, later a judge) was for the Prosecution.
Gardiner examined a long string of witnesses, comparatively few of whom were re-examined by Griffith-Jones & etc.
Quite early on in the proceedings Griffith-Jones asked his now famous question: 'Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?' The enquiry has now passed into history together with the equally well remembered comment (attributed to a peer during the subsequent debate in the House of Lords): 'I should not object to my wife or my daughter reading the book, but I have the strongest objection to it being read by my gamekeeper.'

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Some 2006 news headlines:

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says

Is There a Ring of Debris Around Uranus?

Miners Refuse to Work After Death

War Dims Hope for Peace

Red Tape Holds up New Bridges

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Palindrome:

The noon sex alert relaxes no one. HT.

(James Thurber)
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During the 1930s Thurber was somewhat alienated from several of his writer friends who were adopting extremely left-wing views. Thurber grasped at once the fear and hatred of humour felt by Marxists as perhaps their ideology's greatest enemy. He expresses an aspect of what was happening round him in one of his letters to his friend and collaborator E B White:

This is one of the greatest menaces there is: people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grim grey and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It's a form of egotism, a supreme form. I've toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It's as dangerous as toying with a drug.

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When in 1861 Isaac Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine came to Paris, he was in several respects the prototype of the Henry James American exploring Europe - many times a millionaire, interested in the arts, anxious to widen his horizons.
In one point, however, Singer was very unlike a Jamesian hero. So far from being an innocent, corrupted by the bad Old World, he had fathered sixteen illegitimate children back home, and soon after arrival in Paris he seduced an upper-middle-class French girl thirty years his junior, whom he subsequently married, producing six more, legitimate children.
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'Of that Ilk' simply means that the surname is the same as that of the estate. For example - Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk.
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careen - to lay a ship on its side.
career - a path through life.
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Maundy Gregory (1877-1941) was one of the touts used as a go-between for those who wished to purchase an honour and swell the Liberal (or rather the Lloyd George) Party fund.
There can be no doubt whatever, that the methods employed by Lloyd George when Prime Minister, passed all bounds in the scandalous and utterly cynical manner in which honours (ranging from viscounties downwards) were hawked round literally for sale: sometimes to men of the most dubious reputation.
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