Word: edwardian
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Scandalous! Miss Honeychurch likes to play Beethoven on the pianoforte. This is not a composer with whom respectable young Edwardian women are supposed to become emotionally involved. And indeed, playing him makes her feel "peevish," or perhaps guilty at allowing this expression of her passionate inner nature to burst...
Throughout, Reilly maintains the properly ironic tone. There is no special pleading about British homophobia; Wilde is a collaborator in his own misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does...
Litt explains that she performed extensive research for "Pursuit!, "the story of a 13-year-old boy at a prep school in Edwardian England. Not only has she read widely about life in England before the first World War, but she also spent last semester travelling around England, exploring British "public" schools...
...Montague family, clad in sober Catholic black, to an intimidating silver wine cooler half the size of a Jacuzzi; from Johan Zoffany's courteous but plainspoken portrait of a plump earl on the Grand Tour raising his hat to shield himself from the Florentine sun, to the boot-licking Edwardian rodomontade of John Singer Sargent's huge portrait of the Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt; from a marble mock-Greek portrait by the sculptor Francis Chantrey of two woodcocks he had shot at Holkham Hall, to the Calke State Bed, a sumptuous four-poster whose hangings of gold-embroidered...
...discovery was also a triumph for romance. The sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage, and the death of more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers on board, had signaled the end of the Edwardian era in all its cocky opulence. Last week's unexpected reappearance of the great ship was a welcome touch of vintage nostalgia, like the sight of a top hat or a long white glove. For his part, Ballard was willing to share with the world only a portion of his great discovery. Fearing an onslaught of treasure-seeking vandals, he refused...