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Speakers' corner

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The Penguin Book of 20th Century Speeches Edited by Brian MacArthur Penguin $153 WHEN Sir Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he mobilised the language and made it fight. Who could forget lines like ''I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,'' or ''This was their final hour''? Churchill knew that rhetoric was no guarantee of survival, but he also understood its value. He had, said one admirer, spent the best part of his life preparing his impromptu speeches.

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But has oratory retained its potency? In this age of teleprompters, sound-bites and that monstrous ogre which is worldwide television, surely high rhetoric is a declining art? Editor Brian MacArthur looks at this question in his introduction to this vastly entertaining and informative anthology.

He calls on the opinions of Peggy Noonan. She says the very springs of oratory are drying up, bled by our acceptance of the lowest common denominator and by our addiction to reality that is only virtual.

Ms Noonan is amply qualified to argue her case. She was the author of some of Ronald Reagan's most memorable oratory, most notably his speech to the nation from the White House, hours after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in January 1986.

Reagan was not a great orator (Bill Clinton is worse) but Ms Noonan pulled him through. It was a classic case of a speech-writer finding exactly the right words.

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Ms Noonan remembered a sonnet she had learned in school (High Flight, by Canadian Spitfire pilot John Gillespie McGee, killed at 19 in 1941) and used lines from it to infuse Reagan's speech with a carefully-considered amount of sadness and hope.

''The future is not for the fainthearted, but for the brave,'' she wrote. The Challenger crew, in their quest to push back Man's frontiers, had ''slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God''.

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