Word: foppish
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Only a handful of Parisians read this anemic little book when it first appeared in 1896. Few of them could have thought it likely that its author, a rather foppish and not very likable young social climber, would later devote the bulk of his adult life to composing one of the literary masterpieces of the times: Remembrance of Things Past. Even the most fanatical Proustians will have to grant that Pleasures and Regrets, now translated into English for the first time, is a trivial book. Languid little pseudo-pastoral sketches bedecked with whipped-cream imagery, pallid reflections on life...
...paint 17th Century London society, Washington, D.C. was not yet even a gleam in Architect L'Enfant's eye. This week Washington's National Gallery proudly exhibited "its first full-length portrait from Van Dyck's English period." The portrait, a sparkling evocation of the foppish Duc de Guise, was a New Year's gift from New York Millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. That made the 1,019th painting the National Gallery has been given since it opened its doors in 1941 (it has only found it necessary to buy one painting in that time...
...Foppish & Fussed-Over. Musorgsky was, wrote Composer Alexander Borodin on first meeting him, "quite boyish, very elegant, the very picture of an officer: brand-new, close-fitting uniform . . . sleek pomaded hair, nails as if carved . . . refined, aristocratic manners, conversation . . . sprinkled with French phrases, rath er affected . . . some traces of foppishness. . . . The ladies made a fuss over him. He sat at the piano and, coquettishly throwing up his hands, played . . . very sweetly and gracefully, while the circle around him buzzed . . . 'charmant, delicieux...
Died. Baroness Orczy (Mrs. Montague Barstow), 82, champagne-and-swordplay novelist whose foppish, daredevil hero, "The Scarlet Pimpernel," first appeared in 1905, reappeared in twelve subsequent novels and one book of short stories, was the heaviest single contributor to her fame (and a Riviera villa); in London...
...first great leader of modern Zionism (the name given the Return) was Theodor Herzl, who had been a foppish Viennese journalist until the Dreyfus case in France convinced him that Jews could never hope to be assimilated by other peoples. Herzl, who once claimed to sum up life in the words of a French popular song ("Life is vain, a bit of hope, a bit of hate, and then-good night!"), suddenly became the dynamic leader of Russian ghetto dwellers. At first he favored a British suggestion that persecuted Jews settle in fertile Uganda, but he found his followers would...