Word: courtier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Handsome, meticulous in dress and manner, tactful and discreet, boyish Peter Townsend in almost no time was proving himself indispensable as confidant and courtier. "If I had had a son," George VI once said, "I'd have liked a boy like Townsend." It was inevitable almost from the first that Margaret, who spent much of her girlhood close to her father's side, should have come to share his affection...
Kariye Camii was rebuilt in the early 1300s as a monastery church within Constantinople's mighty walls, at the order of a wealthy courtier, Theodore Metochites. All evidence indicates that the church was decorated by mosaic masters who were buoyed up by the same fresh new breeze of discovery that in the West heralded the first stirrings of the Renaissance. Into the rigid Byzantine forms that had governed Eastern religious art for almost a thousand years, Byzantine artists poured a new warmth drawn from revived classic models...
...first lover. Courtier Serge Saltikov, was "handsome as the dawn; there was no one to compete with him in that." But as soon as the required heir, the future Tsar Paul II, was born, Saltikov was snatched away by Empress Elizabeth and discreetly dispatched to Sweden...
...Sleuth Hoffman says no. He believes that Marlowe was the "secret lover" of Courtier Sir Thomas Walsingham (WalsingHam, suggests Hoffman, is the "Mr. W. H." to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated). Fearing that his boy friend would be burned at the stake for heresy, Walsingham faked up a murder. Only a stooge was buried at Deptford. Marlowe lived on secretly for many years, wrote all the plays of "Shakespeare." In fact, he began to write under Shakespeare's name almost immediately. Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously six weeks before Marlowe's murder, was published four months...
...before he was out of his teens. He built into Versailles a private snuggery known as "the little apartments" (a scant 50 rooms and seven bathrooms), and when this, in turn, became too public, Louis chopped it into smaller and smaller hideouts. In these "rats' nests" (as one courtier contemptuously described them), the King's absolute power lay hidden like the germ in a seed of wheat. The bulk of the palace was no more than a magnificent husk...