The Yellow Glass (39 page)

[37]
Magnus has named his cat after left-wing Chilean poet and politician Pablo
Neruda (1904-1973).

[38]
Dean Martin (1917-1995) Italian-American singer and entertainer with a notably
relaxed and smooth delivery of easy-listening songs.
 
That’s
Amore
was a big hit for Martin in 1952.

[39]
Bankside generated oil-fired electricity from 1952-1981.
 
It is now the Tate Modern art gallery.

[40]
Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-1968) British actor-manager, famed for stage
performances in the over-the-top style of days gone by.

[41]
Poliomyelitis (polio), an acute illness that can cause paralysis and death was
rife throughout the world in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
 
There was an epidemic in the UK in the early
1950’s, with many children infected and sent to isolation hospitals.
 
However, by 1956, the first vaccines were
beginning to be developed.

[42]
Richard III
, an adaptation of
Shakespeare’s play, was a British film that came out in 1955.
 
It was directed, produced and starred Sir
Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), one of the greatest stage actors of his time.

[43]
Effective antihistamine drugs were just beginning to be developed in the early
1950’s.

[44]
Albert Camus (1913-1960) French author, journalist and philosopher who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
 
La Peste (The Plague)
was written in
1947.

[45]
Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), ethnic German industrialist and spy for the Nazi
party, who rescued 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his
factories.

[46]
Friday November 26
^th
1954 saw the worst Channel storm for two
hundred years.
 
The cable attaching the
South Goodwin Lightship snapped and the vessel was wrecked on the Goodwin
Sands.
 
One man escaped, but the bodies
of seven men were never found.

[47]
Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy.
 
The second law of thermodynamics (put very simply) states that heat will
naturally flow from hot to cold places when inside a closed system.

[48]
To Catch a Thief
, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly came out in 1955.

[49]
Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000), famed British actor and director.

[50]
The Merchant of Venice
by William
Shakespeare.
 
Written between 1596 and
1598.
 
Act v, scene i.