Word: dukedom
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Everybody knows the story of The Tempest: the magician Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have lived on a desert island ever since Prospero's brother, Antonio, usurped the Dukedom of Milan and banished them. But now Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck Antonio's passing ship. Antonio and his fellow conspirators fall into Prospero's hands. With the help of the sprites that he controls, Prospero dictates the subsequent events on the island, cunningly arranging a reconciliation and improving his political standing. The play toys with our notions of reality and illusion, and presents an engaging debate about power...
...Bourre's sentences probably read better in the original. "The mouth," he notes at one point, "acts as a trial laboratory as well as a processing plant, and it's also an artist at work." The author, though, has a splendid eye for culinary trivia. In the Germanic dukedom of Saxony, noblemen who illicitly married commoners were punished by being force-fed pepper until they died. The builders of Egypt's pyramids were paid off in onions. The Roman scholar Pliny was startled by the high retail prices of the Eternal City -- "Have times really changed?" the author asks...
...tried to ravish Prospero's daughter, but he was not born to reason or to know right from wrong; he is not immoral, but amoral. It is also true that he plans a rebellion against Prospero. But Prospero, of all people, having been driven out of his rightful dukedom, ought to appreciate that Caliban resents Prospero's blithe colonialistic seizure of power on an island that was Caliban's exclusive domain...
...whose wealth probably ranks second in Great Britain only to the Queen's; of emphysema; at Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. A descendant of William the Conqueror, Grosvenor served in the Royal Artillery during World War II and in the House of Commons from 1955 to 1964 before inheriting the dukedom from his older brother in 1967. Nine years later he passed along to his son Gerald...
...into love. Glencora gives up any notion of running away with the scoundrel Burgo Fitzgerald. Plantagenet, for his part, relinquishes his dream of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer so that he can take her to the Continent. Eventually, however, he does become Chancellor, then Prime Minister, and inherits his dukedom; Glencora becomes a celebrated hostess...