Word: cloak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Rafael Sabatini, 75, author of more than 40 jack-booted cloak-and-rapier romances (Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood), historian and playwright; in Adelboden, Switzerland. Born in Italy and raised as a polyglot cosmopolite, Sabatini made England his home and English ("All the best stories are written in English") his language...
...still make it sound quite proper. He taught history with an actor's skill. Looking majestically out into space, he would boom a few sentences, then pause, then boom out again. Sometimes he would wrap his double-breasted coat close around him as if it were a cloak and seem to become Disraeli, Metternich or Bismarck himself. Even his prolonged "Aahhs . . ." ("A miracle of breath control," one student called them) seemed dramatic. Once, in the midst of his pacings, he fell right off his platform. Nobody laughed, for fear of breaking his spell...
From Dumas to Shellabarger, no significant change has occurred in the plots and protagonists of cloak-&-dagger fiction. Few of the customers who bought a million copies of both Author Shellabarger's Captain from Castile (1945) and Prince of Foxes (1947) would have it any different. Even so, scholarly ex-Princeton Professor Shellabarger gives them a little more than their money's worth. For all its gaudily costumed corn, The King's Cavalier is built on a solid base of research which pays off in such things as a manor house painstakingly reconstructed right down...