Word: authorative
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Author MacNeice does his best work when he is laughing up his Celtic sleeve at the cordial disrespect with which the general run of things inspires him. His letter, Hetty to Nancy, turns a camping trip into a near-masterpiece of burlesquerie, describes, among other things, a pneumatic mattress-"sighing like something out of A. E. Housman;" the three kinds of Central Iceland scenery-"Stones, More Stones, and All Stones;" a tourist party of middle-aged Englishwomen - "with ankles lapping down over their shoes and a puglike expression of factitious enthusiasm combined with the determination...
...Diplomatist-Biographer Harold Nicolson. Vita Sackville-West grew up in an Elizabethan castle which contains 365 rooms, 52 staircases, seven courts, covers seven acres-an environment where, says Hugh Walpole, dukes meant no more to her than Scotland Yard men did to Edgar Wallace. To this background, tall, brunette Author Sackville-West, now 45, owes the subject matter for The Edwardians, a novel which (in the U. S. at least) made her literary reputation, also her semi-legendary fame as heroine of Virginia Woolf's Orlando...
...Pepita. Ample tribute to his diplomatic finesse is that he "managed to keep Pepita as his mistress and Queen Victoria as his employer concurrently for nearly twenty years." When Pepita died in childbirth at 40 she left five children. Queen Victoria's namesake, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina, Author Sackville-West's mother, was the second oldest. Pepita's story, because she herself never speaks in it, has the atmosphere of the old silent cinema. Victoria's is well wired for sound, even some fury...
...Author Sackville-West was their only child. By the time her memories begin, her mother was well launched on a career of making married life interesting. "How my mother puzzled me, and how I loved her!" she declares. Recklessly extravagant in gaudy gimcracks, her mother saved wrapping paper and string, wrote letters on toilet paper. When she got a fresh air mania, she propped open all the doors, ate outdoors, snow notwithstanding. War came "as a personal insult." Her own War service consisted of taking in five wounded Belgians, whom she quickly turned out again as spies because they bored...
...least, is the thesis of Biographer Ludwig's Cleopatra. A by-product of Ludwig's The Nile (TIME, Feb. 22), Cleopatra adds no new data to the little there is to go on: three lines from a letter of Antony's, one authentic bust. But Author Ludwig reopens the 2,000-year-old Cleopatra Case on the grounds that all contemporary evidence, except Plutarch's incomplete account, was only frenzied, made-in-Rome propaganda. His "new" evidence was dug out of a "psychological" investigation. And Author Ludwig does succeed in presenting a Cleopatra who, as Queen...