Word: belgians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...makes more pleasant reading than a novel that is both light and serious-unless it is a love letter written with tact. Alexis Curvers' light and serious novel is a moving love letter to the city of Rome. It consists of the memoirs of Jimmy, an exquisitely cultivated Belgian bum who gets a job as a tourist guide in the Holy City and finds a few shadowy, crackpot friends. There is Sir Craven, so named for his Craven "A" cigarettes, a fop straight out of the Oscar Wilde era and The Yellow Book. There is a businesslike crook named...
...sell shoes for the family firm, headed southward with volumes of Latin poetry-Virgil, Ovid, Horace-packed along with his samples. After four years in the shoe business, he took a train to Washington in 1917 and offered his services as a volunteer worker for Herbert Hoover's Belgian Relief Commission. Drawing no pay (he skimped along on his savings), Strauss worked for Hoover for 2½ years, first as a sort of office boy and then as secretary ("My jewel of a secretary," Hoover called him). When Hoover went to Europe as wartime Food Administrator, he took Strauss...
...took it as a good omen that with his return to Belgium the brouhaha about Prince Albert's marriage showed signs of dying down. At issue was the fact that if Pope John XXIII performed the marriage at the Vatican, there could be no civil ceremony first, as Belgian law requires. Reason: since the Vatican is a sovereign state, it considers its own service to have civil status as well. "In a gesture of particular solicitude toward Belgium." the Pope last week helped to pacify the situation by agreeing that young Albert and Paola should be married in Brussels...
...affairs of state demanding government deliberation and approval, the Cabinet again felt itself insulted, ignored and affronted. Three days later, Pope John XXIII announced in Rome that he would perform the marriage himself at the Vatican, and let it be understood that there would be no civil wedding first. Belgian Socialists cried out that the constitution was being flouted, pointed to Article 16 which declares that civil marriage must precede the religious ceremony. The Vatican held firm: either no civil wedding or no papal ceremony...
...stop!" ended by saying resignedly that "I will leave Laeken; you must find me another place to live." Leopold's preference: the 18th century Villa Belvedere, just across the street from Laeken, once (under the second Leopold) occupied by royal mistresses. The government's countersuggestion: the Belgian royal villa at Grasse in Southern France, far from Laeken and King Baudouin. At week's end it seemed clear that Leopold was leaving. Unresolved: How far away would...