Word: catalonia
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AFTER the Moslem surge exploded out of Arabia in the 7th century and swept westward until it had engulfed Spain, one of the first areas to be liberated (by Charlemagne in 788) was Catalonia. There, in their outpost of Christianity, the proud, fiercely independent Catalans built their churches on the foothills of the Pyrenees, decorated them with some of the oldest European tempera murals and paintings still in existence. Long considered provincial copies of Byzantine art, less rich than the Moorish splendors of the Moslem mosques to the south, and primitive by comparison to the French Romanesque and Gothic triumphs...
...Homage to Catalonia he attempted to write an objective account of the Spanish War. In this book--I think it was his best--his conclusions were sparse, but they seemed to come as discoveries. They exemplified the message that his later works elaborated: that if you make words only out of what you know to be true, and if these words are more often short than long, concrete than abstract, active than passive, the craziest-seeming truth may become clear...
...knew where clear writing would not get him. At the end of Homage to Catalonia Orwell wrote, "I have recorded some of the outward events, but I cannot record the feelings they have left me with. It is all mixed up with sights, smells and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing." It was a part of his respect for privacy--his own and others'--that Orwell made no claim to go farther
...invited him to play and compose at the court. Britain's Queen Victoria soon summoned him to London for a command performance. But his early success gave him little contentment. Tormented by the carnage of World War I, he contemplated suicide, finally settled down in the 1920s in Catalonia, where he conducted a first-rate orchestra ("the grandest instrument of them...
...hieroglyphics scrawled on the richly glazed bark, some bug-eyed figurines that look as if they had just swallowed the pits with the cherries. Most successful are those that, like the 20-in. bull's head, derive their texture and form from the fantastic rock shapes abounding in Catalonia. Miró himself feels that his works, placed out of doors, "immediately form a unity with nature...