Item Condition: Collectible; Very Good
In this new book Alistair Cooke shares his
unique, often startling, personal vision of the
six men whom he has known and found most
fascinating in a lifetime of journalistic encounter
with the great and the famous. They are
Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L.Mencken,
Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson and
Bertrand Russell - cach one of them touched
with a legendary meaning for this century.
Alistair Cooke writes in his introduction:
You can meet some people thirty, forty times
down the years, and they remain amiable by-
standers, like the shore lights of towns that a
sailor passes at stated times but never calls at
on the regular run. Conversely, all considerations
of sex aside, you can meet others once or twice
and they remain permanent influences on your
life...These six men of mine... all made a
deep impression on this century, and their
tračks are very visible in our time...I am
pretty sure that in their different ways they
sounded various tocsins: Mencken tolled the
bell on the genteel tradition; Russell expected,
single-handed, to cleanse the Establishment;
Bogart was the first anti-hero hero; Stevenson,
with a noble nařveté, hoped to render obsolete
the American party political machine; Chaplin
did much to anachronise the tradition of the
gentleman by parodying it on behalf of the
….