Word: ancestors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like the historical Middle Ages, the present era strikes Gurney as a time to conserve a dwindling heritage. His central character admires the medieval period as "a quiet, dull life punctuated by ceremony " That describes precisely the ordered, ancestor-worshiping existence of the families in The Middle Ages and, more broadly, of virtually all families. By the play's end, Gurney's rebel reconciles himself-and the audience-to the serene rewards of dull domesticity...
...August, was as important as the U.S. Navy. It could be, too, that Lord David Cecil, who wrote Kennedy's favorite book, Melbourne, the biography of the youthful Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, and Winston Churchill, in his role as chronicler of the life of his ancestor Marlborough, were as important as the trusted aides who kept long vigils in the White House that October...
...glimpse of Johnson rearranging the facts, the one trait that probably did more to force him into retirement than anything else. Too bad that Johnson could not have brought himself instantly to the good-natured confessional he offered years later: "What I was trying to say was that my ancestor was in a fight at the Alamo-that is, the Alamo Hotel in Eagle Pass, Texas." But that was just the way L.B.J...
...storybook romance," but it was more clearly a dynastic marriage of the kind traditionally made for good, practical reasons by European nobility. In Rainier's case, the practicality was not hard to see. Rainier's Grimaldi clan dates its ascendancy in Monaco from 1297, when his ancestor François the Cunning sneaked into the palace disguised as a monk. By a quirk of French law, Monaco's citizens would lose their tax and military exemptions if Rainier failed to produce an heir to the throne. What Grace got, in addition to a title (Her Serene Highness...
Unlike his ancestor, the monsignor does not tilt at windmills, but joyrides on them, producing some superlative nonsense. In the university town of Salamanca, where Sancho once studied with the philosopher Unamuno, they wander into a Spanish house of prostitution. The unsuspecting Quixote comments, "What a large staff of charming young women for so small a hotel." Ignorant of films, for example, he picks a pious-sounding title for his first viewing. X-rated grunts of A Maiden's Prayer, however, make him wonder: "They seemed to suffer such a lot. From the sounds they made." His more worldly...