Word: abelard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During his dazzling years at Eton and Cambridge, nobody doubted that the very clever boy would build a very clever career. But at what? He was as interested in medieval Latin poetry and Peter Abelard as he was in math and the laws of probability. When he took the civil service exams that led to his first job in the India Office in 1906, his lowest score was in economics. Even after he returned to Cambridge as a don and took to editing the Economic Journal, he was most comfortable among the aesthetes of Bloomsbury. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once referred...
...week for pocket money, obtained "by selling things from the house, including their wedding presents." The sacrifice bore fruit. At 20, Phillips was acting with Laurence Olivier; by the time he was 30, he was an established director in London's West End (Tiny Alice), on Broadway (Abelard and Heloise) and, by preference, in Britain's regional repertory theaters. His success was certified in 1973 when, at age 31, he won one of the most prestigious repertory-theater posts in North America, as artistic director of Canada's Stratford Festival...
Worse still, the world's great love affairs would never have been put to paper. Heloise would not have written Abelard; Abelard would not have written back. Ben Franklin would have quashed his flirting wit; James Joyce his raging jealousies. There would have been none of the sublime torture of the letters of Swift and Vanessa; none of the zest of Franz Liszt...