Word: courtiers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...half brother James Stewart, Earl of Moray. Musgrave, the composer and the wife of Artistic Director Mark, also wrote the libretto. Her story crackles with emotional tension: between Mary, young, lovely and impulsive; James, who craves power; the hotheaded soldier, the Earl of Both well; and the weak courtier, Lord Darnley, her cousin who becomes her husband...
...indigestion. But which is worse, a little gas or two years in the army?" Dave said to me. In one month of gluttony--during which Dave commonly ate four and five meals a day--he added 25 pounds of fat. He took on the appearance of an overfed courtier, a modern-day George III, with his long curly black hair hanging on each side of a puffy, red-cheeked face. The real change, however, was going on inside...
...Chinese tale tells about a tyrannical prime minister of the 3rd century B.C. who assembled his courtier to test their loyalty. He had a deer brough before them and proclaimed it a horse. Those who imprudently disagreed paid the price of calling a horse a horse with their lives...
Much is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's life, much lost. He was a vintner's son who rose (through cleverness and, no doubt, the ability to entertain highborn ladies with after-dinner recitals) to become a government official, courtier and diplomat under three successive monarchs - Edward II, Edward III and Richard II. He was at least briefly a soldier, and while fighting in France under the Black Prince, he was captured, then ransomed for ?16. The smallness of this sum is a favorite joke among Chaucerians, but it amounts to $3,840 in modern terms, by Gardner...
...then came one of the grandest scams of all. In 1910, Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland, a London Times China watcher, published China under the Empress Dowager. The memoir was based on the diary of Ching-shan, a fin de siècle Manchu courtier. Backhouse claimed to have found this trove of gossip and intelligence in its author's house during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The diary became the jewel of the Oxford collection; scholars may have debated its authenticity, but hardly a soul dared suggest that Backhouse himself had written it. Now Trevor-Roper, revealing...