Word: consorte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DUNSTER LIBRARY. The Aeolian Consort. Demonstration and concert of Renaissance music...
Cecil Woodham-Smith's Victoria is the first of two books. It takes the sovereign's life as far as the death of Albert, her prince consort, in 1861. The author had access to the Royal Family Archives at Windsor, and her rich effort at historical reconstruction is one of the finest biographies in English since George Painter's classic Marcel Proust. It is also an engrossing love story. Woodham-Smith is a historian, not a Crawfie. Her romance, moreover, is told without sentimentality and is set against the forbidding complexities of 19th century European politics...
...Chartist riots of 1839, largely because no minister could persuade her that the rabble mattered. Albert and Victoria concurred on one political principle, that a sovereign's duty was to save "her" people from the blunders of their elect ed representatives. By custom, the Queen ruled her consort. In practice he eventually tamed and directed her. "I treasured up everything I heard," she wrote, "kept every letter in a box to tell & show him, & was always so vexed & nervous if I had any foolish draft or dis patch to show him, as I knew it would distress & irritate...
Felix made the grand tour. Starting out in 1829, he traveled for three years. His greatest successes came in London, for the English liked his music as well as his charm. Queen Victoria and her consort spent many a private evening with him, with Mendelssohn playing Albert's new pipe organ and the prince literally pulling out all the stops...
Accessibility is the essence of her appeal. The usual Dyan Cannon role is that of the good-hearted slattern, the readily available Miss-or Mrs. -next door. In Doctors' Wives, she was a bored spouse on the prowl for fresh medical talent; in The Love Machine, the nympho consort of the head of a giant TV network; in The Anderson Tapes, a high-class prostitute. Now Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (TIME, Jan. 10) has her bedding down with her dying husband's best friends-how else is a girl going to cope with the discovery...