Word: grandest
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...tribe knew no privacy, and even the lord of the feudal manor lived in a swarm of servants, children and relatives, often all of them sleeping around the edges of the big hall where the fireplace was. Until the start of the 18th century, rooms in even the grandest houses led into each other. In those days, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, a lady's bedchamber still served as a reception room for her guests; only gradually did it become a retreat (boudoir is derived from the French bonder, to sulk). Privacy became valued as individualism...
Last week's Russian journey is perhaps De Gaulle's grandest gesture-and quite likely his most valuable. Since 1945, when he was declared odd man out at Yalta by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, De Gaulle has put France back on the map as a major world power. He ended the debilitating war in Algeria and added a new dimension to Western handling of the "Third World"; he blew life into the Common Market, even if he chilled the aspirations of those who saw it as a way to political unity on the Continent. In one fell swoop...
There, he had hung a colored reproduction of the Met's 15th century Flemish Merode altarpiece as a souvenir of one of his grandest coups. In 1957 he had the pleasure of propping up the original in his tapestry-hung office, while King Baudouin was trying to keep the masterpiece in Belgium. What the King did not know was that the horse had long since left the barn; the triptych that the art experts thought was the original was only a dimly lit copy...
...Rock." The term has been a designation for many places by men suffering from civic disability-Alcatraz, Guam, Oahu-but the old original Rock was Gibraltar, that whale-headed monolith that was a minor prize and major symbol of the British Empire in its grandest days. Mocked the anti-imperialist Catholic poet Chesterton: "Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain, and attached to its base is the district of Spain...
...coming young businessman can be seen while he watches the show. Scores of elegant new restaurants and bars have opened in the past few years, and they are always packed to their polished oak rafters with an ever expanding jet set, whom Spaniards call hi-lifers (pronounced hee-leefairs). Grandest of all is a converted palace in old Madrid, where, under 18th century tapestries and paintings of the court, diners are offered the specialty of the house: a whole chicken baked in clay, Roman-style, which is deftly parted by the waiter's silver hammer...