Word: austen
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...essence of a secret service that it must be secret, and if you once begin disclosure, it is perfectly obvious . . . that there is no longer any secret service." That wisdom, intoned by Sir Austen Chamberlain during his tenure as Foreign Secretary from 1924 to 1929, has long been the motto of British governments. Indeed, officials traditionally denied the very existence of a secret service...
...windows but such Dutch discoveries as Chinese tea and Oriental carpets. In Georgian England of the following century, the practical was combined with the beautiful. Lo, the great furniture makers: Sheraton, Chippendale, Hepplewhite. "Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort," says a character in Jane Austen's Emma...
...Gelfman, 54, who pedals a bike in his Scarsdale, N.Y., home three or four times a week. His solution: placing a book on an adjacent music stand. Says Gelfman: "I've gotten through all the Winston Churchill volumes on the Second World War, and I just finished the Jane Austen novels...
...though the elder Dorn dies prematurely and leaves Wife Sofka to turn Alfred, Frederick, Mimi and Betty into proper gentlemen and ladies. But there is only so much a mother can do. Alfred is a somber bibliophile destined to run the business and refute the opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"). Frederick seems to have stepped out of Turgenev, a charming, superfluous man of no apparent conviction who winds up happily married...
That, of course, may be mere sentimentalism. Whatever works. Loneliness is the Great Satan. Jane Austen, who knew everything about courtship, would have understood the personals columns perfectly. Her novel Emma, in fact, begins, "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, happy, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition." The line might go right into the New York Review of Books...