Word: birkenhead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Against Oblivion is not exactly a fictionized biography, since letters and diaries carefully document it, but it includes a few invented scenes and speeches. The work of Sheila, Countess of Birkenhead (daughter-in-law of Severn's grandson) it is a labor of love in more senses than one. The affection for Keats with which it is suffused, its portrait of the gentle, sturdy, unworldly, innocent and perceptive Severn, its wonderful picture of Severn's happy family life make it a biography as tender and moving as any in recent literature...
...life story of Omaha's George Francis Train, who, after failing to become "President" of Australia (somebody bungled the revolution), invented eraser-tipped pencils, postage stamps with perforated seams, retractable carriage steps. After building the first streetcar lines between Liverpool and Birkenhead, Train circled the globe in 80 days (said Train of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days: "He stole my thunder. I'm Phileas Fogg"). During the Paris Commune, Train wrapped himself in French and American flags, screamed at a firing squad: "Fire, fire, you miserable cowards." He lived to be buried...
...dismissed all ideas with "forgive my sense of humor"—a gallery which should convince almost everybody that Wells, like Dickens, is no caricaturist of English life but a dispenser of literal and horrifying truth. And there Teddy ran foul of two "overripe virgins," bleached Miss Blame and malapropist Miss Birkenhead, who once spent six months in Paris, calls her Paris sugar daddy her faux...
Until Evahgeline Birkenhead's advent, Teddy's amative life had been in part fanciful, in part optical, in part under suburban hedges ("Starp it, I tell you!"), entirely virginal. When Teddy surprisingly received a comfortable bequest, Miss Birkenhead beat Miss Blame in the race for Hero Tewler. The seduction, marriage and sexual initiation, cruel but convincing, are brightened only by a dandified best man who neighs a stentorian Hey! before every brontosaurian innuendo...
...Lord Birkenhead on Sir Samuel Hoare : "The trouble with Sam is that he is descended from a long line of maiden aunts...