Word: blore
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...What you get for your 8 pounds is a walk through the main formal rooms: the Throne Room, the Picture Gallery, the Green, Blue and White drawing rooms, the best of which were designed by George IV's architect John Nash, and the worst by his pupil, Edward Blore. "Blore the bore," as he came to be known, took over the decoration of Buckingham Palace after Nash was dismissed by George IV's successor, William IV, for his "inexcusable irregularity and great negligence." Blore was a beacon of probity, but not of talent. His lack...
...reason why the Throne Room, the red chamber where knights are dubbed beneath a plaster frieze of roly-poly figures enacting scenes from the Wars of the Roses, is so curiously ungrand. Not all of that is Blore's fault -- the squat thrones themselves, one with EIIR embroidered on it and the other with P for Philip, were done in 1953 and look Hollywood-Ruritanian, if not suburban. You can't help reflecting on the amount of lobbying from aspirant title seekers that has focused on this red room over the past century...
...over-bearing detective William Blore, Jeff Branion uses his physical presence skillfully, throwing his theories around in as imposing a manner as he propels his body. And Captain Philip Lombard (Glenn Kiser) highlights the sinister elements that lurk beneath seemingly innocent characters when he defends the abandonment of African soldiers under his command by saying, "Natives don't mind dying; they don't think of it as Europeans...
...action, however, is never as arresting as those who initiate it. The smitten Hughie is a striking example of what the author calls "an overdeveloped inner life." Bernadette is a stinging portrait of stupidity (a pimp recruits her with veiled threats, and she mistakes him for a social worker). Blore is an overbearing ass who makes a big production about serving a modest Spanish wine and talks of W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence as if he has discovered the latest bestseller...
...sins of the flesh, while the transgressions against reason are greeted with disdain. Conservative authority is the secret hero of this book; hapless liberalism and its freebooting institutions are the goats. The result is a sharp irony concisely expressed by an envious KGB agent: "How could a man reach Blore's position of eminence without being checked or vetted? Questions like this were put in the public mind by the likes of Feathers. In other words, he worried them, and stirred them up. For this, the capitalist press magnates paid him sums far in excess...