Word: aubrey
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Like most busy men of affairs, Banker Aubrey West of London never worried much about the illegible scratches and scrawls of his careless handwriting. Then, one day in 1950, while browsing at his club, he happened to spot a book containing examples of Renaissance calligraphy. One sample that caught his eye was that of Ludovico degli Arrighi, a 16th Century Vatican scribe who wrote thus...
...wittiest woman in the world," said Oscar Wilde of Ada Leverson. Others who admired Ada's sparkle were Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw (whom she succeeded as drama critic of the Saturday Review). Venomous with bores, she flattened them joyfully. When a vacation acquaintance buttonholed her with "I don't know whether you realize it ... but my aunt was a Thunderby," Ada cried, "Oh, how terrible! Oughtn't we to inform the management?" Accused of using peroxide on her hair, she flashed that she "only darkened it a little at the roots...
...last month Ingram stopped at the farm of Aubrey Boswell, a white neighbor. He wanted to borrow a trailer to haul his hay. Ingram saw one of the Boswell children walking toward the tobacco barn carrying a hoe. He walked across the road, he said, and through a field knee-high in corn, looking for Boswell. When he got closer and saw only "three boys," he turned back. He went on down the road and borrowed a trailer from someone else. Later that afternoon, two deputy sheriffs arrested him. One of the "boys," they said, was 17-year-old Willa...
...Yellow Book was a queer literary blossom of the not-so-Naughty Nineties. Stuffy contemporaries thought it a stinkweed, but today it seems more like a pressed rose-flat and sere. A British quarterly launched by Critic Henry Harland and Draftsman Aubrey Beardsley, it ran from 1894 to 1897, published the trial flights of half a dozen future soarers...
...rebellious young intellectuals, it was the resolute opposite of Victorianism. Against Mrs. Grundy's boned corset it set the languid flow of an Aubrey Beardsley tunic. It opposed ice-water morality with the dreggy wine of French "realism." It countered convention with Oscar Wildeish witticisms ("Where is the pleasure of having parents if you may not disobey them"). For common sense it substituted shamelessly overgrown verbiage (" 'Tears, little one,' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the fish-pools of your eyes...