Word: bric-a-brac
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...priceless relics of Pharaonic culture, a 100blade knife, an outstanding coin collection, a Nazi marshal's gaudy baton. Egypt's revolutionary regime was putting all of it-treasure and trash-on the block in a six-week sale. It was the biggest mass merchandising of such bric-a-brac in nearly two centuries. Egypt needs the money for a hydroelectric dam and for land reform...
...threat of death with be havior that is a degradation of the hu man spirit. The rich are fleeing the plague in expensive carriages, bribing quarantine officials to let them through. The middle class are incapable of fleeing because they are weighed down by stuffed furniture and bric-a-brac. The poor are working themselves into a state of hysteria by spreading and believing bloodcurdling ru mors. The happy-go-lucky are whoring and boozing in a last, sordid spree; the eccentrics are staging a comic opera and disguising themselves from death by dressing up as Pierrots, Harlequins, Columbines, clowns...
...many British brands, is not going to laugh itself hoarse at this one. But to some, e.g., the sort of people who understand that the passion for antiques is a bit silly but go on collecting them anyway. Genevieve will come as an irresistible little piece of comic bric-a-brac...
...gets the money it needs, one of the first exhibits to be spruced up will be the fading dresses once worn in the White House. Carefully fitted to wax dummies, the old clothes will be displayed in eight separate rooms, complete with White House mantelpieces, furniture and odd bric-a-brac. "Women," says Dr. A. Remington Kellogg, director of research, "deserve a fine setting...
Upstairs, miles of corridors, reception rooms, drawing rooms, anterooms, bedrooms, bathrooms were lined with paintings and stuffed with bric-a-brac. The music room, as big as a cathedral, housed all kinds of instruments, including an antediluvian phonograph and an organ. All the instruments were automatic. In the gymnasium were all sorts of exercise equipment, including an ingenious machine, made in Battle Creek, Mich., which was supposed (but signally failed) to keep the royal rump from becoming imperial. Farouk's study was a pornographer's paradise, hung with garish paintings and crammed with statuettes of nudes in attitudes...