Word: buckingham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...state rooms contain only a tiny fraction of the immense Royal Collection (10,000 pictures, they say, with 30,000 drawings and half a million prints), better sampled in the galleries outside the palace that are always open to the public and have no queues. Buckingham Palace does contain some great pictures though. Most are from the Netherlands: Rembrandt's ship $ builder, with his sketches of hull sections before him, being handed a note by his stout wife; top-flight Rubenses; and Van Dyck's two portraits of Charles I, especially the "greate peece," which depicts him with his consort...
...many of them English ones, heavily reinforced with Japanese and Americans) are in the queue; the earliest ones, real frogs from France, had been here since 7. Dress: sneakers, blousons, & rucksacks, jeans. A suit or two. We are a long way from the days when a minister, arriving at Buckingham Palace in trousers rather than knee breeches, was asked why he had joined the retinue of the American ambassador...
...fire last year. Subtext: p.r. to make up for the behavior of her offspring and their spouses -- Di the bulimic fairy princess, fat Fergie and her toe-sucking Texan "financial adviser," Charles' ambition to become Camilla Parker-Bowles' Tampax. Will a trot through the state rooms of Buckingham Palace raise our minds from these mundane affairs...
...place began. In 1623 the Earl of Middlesex leased the land from James I to grow mulberry trees to feed the worms. Alas, the earl planted the wrong trees, and the worms did not spin. Eighty years later, it was leased again by the Duke of Buckingham, who built a house there. Then George III bought the house, which was enormously enlarged by his son George IV: it was his special folly. His son William IV pronounced it "hideous" and suggested turning it into a barracks. His daughter Victoria thought it was too small, but put up with...
There are 600 rooms in Buckingham Palace, of which 18 are now open to the public. Quite enough. No tourists will see the royal bedrooms, and nobody but a sociologist would want to visit whatever remains of the tiny attic chambers where the housemaids -- whose salary Prince Albert, shortly after marrying Victoria, cut from about 45 pounds to 12 pounds a year -- used to sleep, and perhaps still do. 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...