Word: corvo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ball as a raven and voiding a pint of whitewash from his tail in front of the Prince of Wales. He converted to Roman Catholicism and, in pursuit of holy orders, got himself expelled from two different seminaries for "lack of vocation." He then assumed the bogus title Baron Corvo and tried his loser's hand at painting, photography, journalism and schoolteaching - ending his days in Venice as a mincing homosexual with a monumental case of paranoia...
Frederick William Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, was one of the more freakishly talented eccentrics of English letters. A homosexual, a paranoiac, a scoundrel, a petty blackmailer and a fake, he was constantly in debt, sponged on his friends, excoriated his enemies and died in 1913 in self-imposed exile in Venice. At 26 he converted to Roman Catholicism and trained for the priesthood. Twice dismissed from seminaries, he retained a lifelong conviction of his priestly vocation...
...novel Hadrian VII, an account of how a once-rejected candidate for the priesthood was astonishingly elected Pope out of a clear blue Roman sky. Now Hadrian has been skillfully dramatized by Peter Luke, who also relies on A.J.A. Symons' biography of Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo. The result is an effulgent theatrical success in a wan London dramatic season...
...earliest literary critics, handsome Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whose books, largely about marriage and the private worlds of modern people, are less ambitious but far better crafted than her husband's; her most recent: The Unspeakable Skipton, a witty, waspish caricature of the famed adventurer, "Baron Corvo." The Snows share a ten-room London flat and a 6½-year-old son. Snow likes to be in the worldly swim and throws parties conspicuously free of fellow novelists. Sir Charles is a shade stuffy about most 20th century authors; of another practicing panoramist, Lawrence Durrell, he says...