Word: dorset
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...consisted of a bicycle ride followed by afternoon tea, to remind his fellow Victorians of an England darker and madder than anything in literature since Lear roamed the heath. The novelist made contemporary by film (Tess) and television (The Mayor of Casterbridge) was born in 1840 in a remote Dorset village. There, farmers, shepherds and artisans lived in a kind of Elizabethan time warp. But something dour and reductive in this son of a stone mason drove him back beyond morris dances to a pagan Britain haunted by ancient superstitions and druidic spells...
...frightened by his own demons, Hardy kept a decent distance in his life from all whirlwinds. He spent the better part of his days in the upstairs study of an ugly, respectable villa called Max Gate. Even his walks into the Dorset countryside-referred to as Wessex in his novels-tended to be circumscribed: the strolls of a suburbanite. Visitors expressed surprise at his pallor...
Among families of the dead, the forms of grief were mixed. Said Harry Taylor of the Dorset village of Ryme Intrinseca, father of the first Harrier pilot to be shot down: "I am proud to have a son who died doing the job he loved for the country he loved. Nick was always fully aware of the dangers." But Joan Goodall, the Enfield, Middlesex, mother of a 21-year-old cook aboard the Sheffield, was far airport stoic. Said she of her son Neil: "He never joined the navy to die for something as wasteful as this. I feel totally...
...best tradition of her genre, Warner recalls old gardens and village churches and eccentric nannies and a dotty old major, a bit the worse for duty in India, and, yes, her dogs. When she died in the Dorset village of Maiden Newton in 1978, discreet as an old teacup at the age of 84, she already passed for an Edwardian relic, inhabiting, in her own words, a "long, long ago, when there was a Tzar in Russia, and scarcely an automobile or a divorced person in Mayfair...
This little old lady of Dorset, who was an authority on Tudor church music, had an imagination that unpredictably "caught fire from facts," as she said of T.H. White in her biography of the author of The Once and Future King. Everything took on an enchanted significance for her-dragonflies, mushrooms, four-leaf clovers, bits of broken pottery. Like White, she could not walk out her back door without seeing druids and pucks and Camelot. The only child of a schoolmaster-"solitary and agnostic as a little cat"-she was a wild romantic beneath the maiden-aunt exterior that...