Word: gentleman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novelist, who saw himself as "Pole, Catholic and Gentleman," left his native country at age 16. Between then and the age of 40, he voyaged all over the world, soaking up South American background for stories like Nostromo and Caspar Ruiz, working on sailing ships, where his experiences served as the basis for The Nigger of the Narcissus. He joined a steamship expedition up the Congo, which became the setting for Heart of Darkness. The circumstances of his life would seem to require little exaggeration, but Conrad loved to romanticize everything, including himself. As Tennant shows, he probably never...
...Knesset session, raucous and bitter, lasted for almost 14 hours. Opposition Leader Shimon Peres charged that the coalition talks had been preoccupied with "payoffs for the religious parties and ministries for the power hungry." Begin, who was heckled repeatedly, said angrily of Peres, "The gentleman is a liar; the gentleman is a liar." Reviewing the proceedings, a ranking civil servant in Jerusalem predicted that the new Knesset would be "entertaining, but disgraceful." And from all signs, ineffectual...
...natured insults. Louise keeps house and her own counsel; the defiantly cheerful Gilles looks at life from a wheelchair, through a telescope lens. But there is untapped love in them both, and a desperate resolve. Louise places a personal notice in the local paper, asking to meet a "refined gentleman." To her shock and chagrin, the one respondent is Gilles. "My legs are paralyzed," he declares in his first letter, "but my heart is free and I know how to love." And so Louise determines to create another life, a love life, for her brother: she writes...
...about the Confederacy, he said, it was an old ethos, which, though mired in the horrors of the mid nineteenth-century South, had at least bothered to aspire to something while in the North industrialization ran amok. After the Civil War, the North took up the ideal of the gentleman planter for a while, and the legend of Lee--a fundamentally Northern myth--was born in cities full of coal and smoke. But the North was never serious about it. They took it up for fun. They took it up as a style. They took it up as a style...
Throughout, life in town and country is laced with sundry subplots involving rogues, bullies, detectives, tarts and popinjays, as well as a few sterling characters ranging from a Cantabrigian historian to a gentleman's gentleman, who almost rates a novel by himself. Young Churchill makes an appearance. The suffragists and the Irish troubles and Kaiser Wilhelm crowd in, sometimes hilariously. Edward VII comes across -accurately-as a spoiled, imperious near Nero who nonetheless had a regal way with bridge, economics and foreign policy. The novel ends in 1914, four years after Edward's death, as the honeyed England...