Word: gothic
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...novels have regularly made the bestseller lists. The Gabriel Hounds ranks a cut below her earlier works, but it still offers her familiar, quick, neatly joined narrative and travel-poster background (Lebanon this time). There is also a crumbling castle for just the right touch of the gothic, and an anti-anti-hero who is restless, wealthy, athletic, loves poetry, and drives a white Porsche. With his help, the heroine invades the castle in search of an eccentric great-aunt and finds instead a dope-smuggling operation. The young lovers rout the criminals and head blissfully for the altar. Kismet...
...time they are cheered on by starving drifters who vicariously enjoy the cocky resume: "I'm Clyde Barrow, and this is Miss Bonnie Parker. We rob banks." In an episode at once poignant and wonderfully funny, Clyde lends his .45 to a Texas-gothic farmer, who shoots his deserted farmhouse, repossessed by the bank. They speed away from their jobs in a succession of stolen cars-their Ford coupes, Essex tourer and Marmon Saloon are virtually living members of the cast. The sound track adds a further fillip to the humor; the exuberant banjo picking of Earl Scruggs playing...
Though it may have been absurd, there was nothing contemptible about the antiquarian passion that swept a good part of the British upper classes at the time, when architects like Sir George Gilbert Scott and A.W.N. Pugin were creating hundreds of Neo-Gothic churches and restorations throughout England, and Sir Charles Barry was faking the medieval Houses of Parliament. For a generous spirit like Morris, it was an easy step from saying that life once was beautiful to believing that it could and should be beautiful again...
...Knoxville, Tenn., barber's son who studied mathematics in college and made a career out of medical journalism, he first fell in love with medieval cathedrals by feasting his eyes on them while a student at the Sorbonne. Before he ever cracked a book about it, Gothic art had become a secret passion. Now, with time to pursue it, he has written a revolutionary study, rediscovering scores of facts about medieval iconography and making the 12th and 13th centuries come to life with a vividness that is impressing even medieval scholars...
...hereditary peers number 865. Twenty-six bishops of the Church of England sit as lords spiritual, and 154 life peers have been created under the 1958 act. In a title-conscious country, the Lords enjoy high prestige. Their most important perquisite is the right to sit in the elaborately Gothic House of Lords, where everything from special parking spaces out front to toilets marked "Peers" smacks of privilege. And, as Anthony Sampson notes in his Anatomy of Britain Today: "A Lord finds it easier to get servants, to run up credit, to get the best cuts of beef, to book...