Word: basilisk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pollard stands outside art history. The anonymous artist plainly forgot himself and what little he may have known of artistic conventions the moment Dame Pollard's basilisk stare fell upon him. He painted her neither as a tender dream, like Margaret Gibbs, nor as a fleshly reality, like Thomas Smith, but as an apparition. Shrewd as J. P. Morgan, straight as Queen Victoria, she rises out of the night, holding her book like a scepter. The ancient well merited her haunting memorial. One of Boston's original settlers, she bore twelve children, kept a tavern and lived...
...tragicomedy of Katharine the Shrewd and Kate the Romantic is played out against the overpowering Technicolor backdrop of Venice. At first. Katharine is all businesslike competence: she industriously snaps photos, craftily measures out tips, keeps her basilisk eye fixed warily on the untrustworthy Italians. But then the Venetian magic begins; she throws open her pensione window to a vista of blue sky, green water and honey-colored walls. She walks along the canals, dazed by the murmurous dusk, by the majesty of campanile and palace, by the whisper of a distant guitar. Few actresses in films could equal Hepburn...
Readers may also join the lively game that Translator White plays among the footnotes and try to puzzle out what animal, vegetable or mineral the Middle Ages mistook for unicorn, dragon, griffin, basilisk, etc. White guesses that the poison-breathing basilisk was very likely the cobra, but thinks the griffin was strictly mythological, in fact "something of a Hieroglyphin...
...Basilisk Eye. Among the other odds and ends of Ickes' diary is the story of his efforts to encourage F.D.R. to intercede directly with the Vatican for the appointment of Bishop Bernard J. Sheil as Archbishop of Chicago. Said Ickes: "I do not think that the Vatican would have dared to turn him down if he had made strong representations.'' Ickes also relates rather gleefully how the President "developed the groundwork for a campaign against Willkie. He is going to try to tie Willkie in with the idea of the 'corporate state,' which was Mussolini...
...with the air of an early Christian martyr, with his hands folded, looking at the edge of the table without seeing it or anything else. I think that he was totally oblivious as to what was going on. As usual. I studiously avoided being caught by Perkins' basilisk eye. Henry Wallace was contemplating the ceiling." The date was May 24, 1940. The Germans had burst through the Maginot line and were heading for Paris...