In this December 13, 1943, episode of Information Please, Clifton Fadiman moderates regulars Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran with two distinguished guests: news commentator Quincy Howe and diplomat-scholar T. F. Tsiang. The panel ricochets from literature to geopolitics—quoting Shakespeare and Confucius, revisiting wartime maps, and trading quips about clocks, conferences, and courtship—while Heinz’s sponsor spots keep the proceedings savory.  

Highlights include: authors “about man” (Hamlet’s “What a piece of work,” Confucius via the Analects, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida); territories to be taken from Japan (Mandate islands; Manchuria, Formosa, Pescadores; Guam/Wake); and literary parenthood (Lady Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Peggotty). The crew recalls Lincoln refusing to sack Grant over whiskey, Perry at Nagasaki, and Columbus pressing on; then maps famed journeys (the 622 Hijra from Mecca to Medina; de Soto’s El Dorado; Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage). They trace exiles who lived in America—Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Garibaldi (Staten Island), and Trotsky—swap poetic timepieces and “by/to/from sea” lines, tick off wartime conferences (Mena House near Cairo; Quebec’s Château Frontenac; Moscow’s Spiridonovka House), and close with literary lovers who couldn’t quite propose (Cyrano, Sydney Carton, and Miles Standish/John Alden).