Table of contents for No 456 in Speak Up

TOP BRITS Known as the ‘golden boy of English football’, Bobby Moore was captain of the national team that defeated1 West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley Stadium, to give England its only World Cup title to date2. Bobby Moore was born in Barking, Essex in 1941 and played football from childhood. He made his debut with West Ham United in 1958 and by 1964 was England’s captain, a position he would hold for ninety games. With West Ham, he won the FA Cup in 1964 (when he was named England’s ‘Footballer of the Year’), and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. WORLD CUP CAMPAIGN Moore’s moment in history came with the 1966 World Cup campaign, during which he established himself as a world-class player and…

MUSIC The story of a teenage summer romance in the 1950s, as told from the different points of view of Danny Zuko, a US high school student, and Sandy Olsson, an Australian who has moved to America, Summer Nights was a massive1 hit in 1978. It will always be associated with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, who performed it for the film version of the musical Grease2. However, the song, written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, was first recorded by Barry Bostwick and Carole Demas for the 1972 Broadway production. At the start of the new high school year, Danny, a macho womaniser3 , brags4 about the physical aspects of his fling5 to his gang, the T-Birds, exaggerating or even inventing some parts. Meanwhile, strait-laced6 Sandy shares her far…

Poker has become a capitalist enterprise1 for the masses. With its promise of easy money, for many enthusiasts, it represents the American dream. We spoke to Oliver Roeder, author of Seven Games: A Human History, which explores the history and attraction of poker, among other popular games. He believes it to be emotionally tied to the US. Oliver Roeder (American accent): I think poker is an essentially American game in the sense that I think Las Vegas is an essentially American city. Like, where else but the US? I think the appeal is capitalistic. This idea of the frontier and get-rich-quick. The ‘almighty2 dollar’ kind of thing. BIG MONEY That kind of thinking kicked off3 the most recent poker boom twenty years ago, starting with a fairy-tale4 story of an…

PEOPLE INTERVIEW New Yorker Jonathan Eig is the author of five books, three of them bestsellers. Crowning his career so far is Ali: A Life, probably the definitive biography of heavyweight1 boxer Muhammad Ali. The book is based on more than five hundred interviews, as well as thousands of pages of previously-unreleased FBI files. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates called Eig’s work “an epic of a biography.” Muhammad Ali died in 2016, but remains one of the most charismatic and controversial athletes of all time. To find out more about him, Speak Up contacted Eig. We began by asking him what made Ali such an outstanding2 boxer. Jonathan Eig (American accent): Ali’s boxing skills were unusual. It was rare to see a heavyweight fighter who could move as quickly as…

CULTURE INTERVIEW The Marquis de Sade evokes images of dystopia, a world pushing dangerously at its limits. But many people who felt bound1 by convention also found his philosophy liberating. Alyce Mahon is Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (2020). She believes that Sade can help us respond to the challenges of the 21st century: from gender fluidity to technology’s most worrying trends. As she explains, while Sade is a product of his times, his experience is comparative to ours. AlyceMahon(Irish accent): He lived in a period of revolution and terror, of liberty and evil, and he was a witness to that. We have the French Revolution, the call of the people for liberty, but also…

This short and intense book recounts1 the year of ‘magical thinking’ experienced by its author, Joan Didion, after the death of her husband, fellow2 journalist John Gregory Dunne. What she refers to as ‘magical thinking’ is the belief that thoughts alone have the power to bring about3 effects in the external world, and that unrelated events are causally connected despite there being no plausible reason behind it. This leads the magical thinker to draw conclusions4 that inevitably involve the acceptance of the supernatural. NEW JOURNALISM Author of renowned non-fiction, including the essay collections Slouching5 Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White  Album (1979), Joan Didion, who died in 2021, was a pioneer of New Journalism, an innovative non-fiction genre that employed literary techniques. For instance, a writer may recount their personal…

William Shakespeare introduced many phrases and expressions into common language. ‘A wild goose chase’ is one of them. Today, the idiom refers to a lengthy but ultimately hopeless quest, but this is a modern meaning acquired by the 19th century. In the 16th century, a ‘wild-goose chase’ was an equestrian term: it was a race in which horses had to follow a lead horse at a set distance in a formation that looked like wild geese in flight. The phrase appeared in Gervase Markham’s A Discourse of Horsmanshippe in 1593. In 1595, Shakespeare used it in Romeo and Juliet in a scene where Mercurio is losing a battle of wits with Romeo. Mercurio refers to Romeo’s wordplay as so much better than his own that it resembles the leading horse:…

ARTÍCULOS POR NIVELES Todos nuestros artículos se presentan con un código de color para indicar el nivel de dificultad del inglés empleado de acuerdo con la Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A2 PRE-INTERMEDIATE B1 LOWER INTERMEDIATE B2 UPPER INTERMEDIATEC1 ADVANCEDC2 PROFICIENCY GLOSARIO Encontrarás el vocabulario más relevante de cada artículo indicado con un número en el color correspondiente a su nivel de dificultad y su traducción en el glosario adjunto. A towering1 figure in British history, Queen Victoria was actually a diminutive figure, just one metre fifty EXPLAINS Los textos subrayados en amarillo indican que la frase requiere de una explicación más extensa, como referencias históricas o culturales, frases hechas, proverbios o argot. Encontrarás la explicación al final del artículo. SPEAK UP IN CLASS SPEAK UP IN CLASS…

Britain has acquired a global reputation for having cold wet1 weather all year round. Every summer, vast numbers of Britons flock2 to warmer, drier places for their holidays. But in fact, the British Isles can get very hot, and this has become increasingly noticeable in recent years with the climate crisis. Soaring3 temperatures have brought unexpected problems, as few British buildings are adapted for hot weather. So what do you say if you are in the UK and affected by the heat? Here are some colloquial phrases to help you suitably4 express your discomfort. NICE AND COSY, OR STIFLING? Most British homes are built to keep you warm, so when it’s raining outside and you’re sitting in a comfortable armchair5 near a blazing6 or even roaring fire7, you can describe…

From early history to today’s pop culture, the desert is a place where we seek1 something infinite, something eternal; where we step out of the human populated world into a spiritual, magical realm. From the 3rd century on, early Christian hermits known as the Desert Fathers travelled into the Western Sahara, where they formed the basis of Christian monasticism, following the example of Jesus’ life of poverty, austerity and self-denial2. In modern TV series, such as Breaking Bad, the desert is a place of freedom, possibility and lawlessness3. DESERT QUEST Award-winning British writer William Atkins decided to travel to eight of these vast arid spaces: the Empty Quarter4 of Oman, the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert and Maralinga in Australia, the man-made5 desert of…

It was a sad day for Roy, the saddest day of the year: today was the one-year anniversary of the death of his wife Maggie. He and Maggie had been married for forty-two years and had two children together. No marriage was perfect, but Roy had been a good husband and Maggie, for the most part, had been a good wife. It had been a difficult year for Roy. He still lived in the family home, and sometimes he found the silence oppressive. At these times, he often reflected1 on his memories2 of Maggie because now that she was dead, memories were all he had. “But the problem with memory,” he now told his brother, Sam, “is that it’s fallible.” That’s why today, on this sad but special anniversary, he…

Animal group names, or collective nouns1 for animals, are specific words used to describe a collection of animals of the same kind2. You are probably familiar with a number of them: for example, a group of wolves or dogs that hunt together is called a ‘pack3’. The term ‘swarm4’ is commonly used for a large group of insects, such as a swarm of bees or locusts5. A group of fish that stay together for social reasons is called a ‘shoal6’ and, if they are swimming in the same direction in a coordinated manner, is called a ‘school7’. When we talk about a large group of animals, especially mammals8 with hooves9, we refer to them as a ‘herd10’ (a herd of cows or a herd of buffaloes, for example). In the…

DIALOGUES NOW LET’S REVIEW THE VOCABULARY! Baking and sweltering are synonyms for ‘very hot’. You can also say ‘scorching11’ or ‘boiling12’. When you are mistaken13, you get it wrong; conversely, when you guess correctly, you ‘get it right’. Same old, same old is an expression to indicate that the same thing always happens in a particular situation. In this context, down means it is not working. To make do with something means to tolerate it. A heat wave is a period of unusually hot weather. To grumble is a synonym of ‘to complain’. Blustery is another word for ‘windy’. Other options include ‘gusty14’ or ‘breezy15’. Upside means the positive aspect of a situation which is generally bad. The opposite is ‘downside16’. When something takes a turn for the worse, it…

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in racially-segregated Louisville, Kentucky in 1942. He started boxing when he was twelve years old and proved to be a precocious talent, with a dazzling1 mix of power and speed. Unlike2 other boxers, who were clunky3 and ponderous4, he danced gracefully around the ring. Outside the ring he had great charm5, personality and humour. He was the first fighter to win the World Heavyweight6 Championship three times, winning classic fights along the way against Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. After beating Liston, he declared himself a follower of the Nation of Islam and took the name of Muhammad Ali. When he refused to fight in the Vietnam War in 1967, to the anger7 of millions of White Americans, he was banned8 from…

French aristocrat Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was born in Paris in 1740. He spent his late teens1 in the military, where he discovered he liked rough sex2. On leaving3, he married, but then engaged in4 orgies and affairs with women and men. He hired young prostitutes, submitting them to sexual abuses and torture. Some complained that he’d tried to poison them with an aphrodisiac called ‘Spanish fly’. THE BASTILLE Accused of sexual deviance5 and blasphemy (a serious offence at the time), Sade was imprisoned in 1768, and then again in 1777, where he tried to incite a revolt. In 1784, he was transferred to the Bastille prison in Paris. There, on a roll of paper twelve metres long, he secretly wrote Les 120 Journées de Sodome (120 Days of…

Susan Sarandon is an Oscar-winning actor renowned1 for her commitment2 to social justice. Born in Queens, New York in 1946, she is of British and Italian descent. Sarandon studied drama in the late 1960s, a crucial time in US social history. Since then the seventysix-year-old has consistently aligned her career with her progressive values. CULT & ICONIC Sarandon’s first role as a disaffected3 teen in the movie Joe (1970) was followed by playing Janet Weiss in the cult movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Her first Oscar nomination was for romantic-gangster movie Atlantic City (1981), and she was nominated again for playing Louise in the iconic feminist film Thelma & Louise (1991). Her Oscar win for Dead Man Walking (1995), directed by her then-husband4 Tim Robbins, reflected their concern…