Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...John Gielgud, Lady Diana Cooper and Richard Attenborough dined at 8:30 or thereabouts, and Merle Oberon flew in from Acapulco. The Queen Mother Elizabeth had him round to lunch. Book shops positively blossomed with Sheridan Morley's new Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse. At London's Phoenix Theater, Princess Margaret and Tony joined everyone in singing "Happy Birthday." After which Richard Briers and Susannah York did the balcony scene from Private Lives (currently playing in Manhattan, amid great nostalgia and critical acclaim). Other Coward sketches and songs followed until, at 4 in the morning, the Chinese...
...love conquers all, including clinical details. It even manages to overcome the index-card scholarship ot the author, a professor of Italian literature at Berkeley. Yet despite the innate beauty of its subject and its careful grooming by its author, The Kiss Sacred and Profane is the sort of book that one normally takes to lunch but rarely...
Eventually the idea of sexual restraint became an important element in that brocaded bag of tricks known as courtly love. But it took the cleverness of Baldassare Castiglione, a 16th century popularizer of Platonic love treatises, to humanize the conceit for sophisticated courtiers. In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Castiglione distinguished between sensual love and what he called rational love. Rational love, he said, puts greater emphasis on the senses of sight and hearing. He argued that as conduits for soul mergers, the eyes and ears are superior to the mouth, which responds to the inflammatory sense of touch...
...pleasant Sunday afternoon aboard H.M.S. Beagle, outward bound from Plymouth in 1831 on a scientific voyage around the world, Robert FitzRoy, her captain, would entertain his officers with readings from the Bible. A painting of such an event is one of the illustrations in Alan Moorehead's book. Depicted as a drab civilian among the scarlet naval persons present, the ship's naturalist, Charles Darwin, also clutches a Bible. The Beagle's Bibles contained an annotation dictated by the Anglican Archbishop Ussher, firmly stating that the Creation began promptly at 9 a.m., Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. After...
...botanist, led to Darwin's recommendation as the Beagle's naturalist. Chance, plus a certain amount of charm, determined that he hit it off immediately with the Beagle's hot-tempered Captain FitzRoy, a Tory traditionalist with a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis...