Word: guedalla
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life was both disappointed and disappointing, it was lively and varied; if for that reason only, both of last week's biographies make interesting reading. A little carried away himself by the brilliant instability of his subject's period, Author Jones adopts the method of Guedalla and Strachey, devoting much space to contemporary modes and fashions, interspersing brisk epigrammatic surveys of political movements, quoting newspapers, hotel menus indiscriminately, in the effort to keep not only his subject but his background alive in the reader's mind. The method adds sparkle but leads to trivia (example: Moore...
...HUNDRED YEARS-Philip Guedalla -Doubleday...
Newspapers measure history in daily doses. Weeklies can take it in more concentrated form. Historians often swallow a century at a gulp. In The Hundred Years, Philip Guedalla, historian with a fine journalistic palate, combines these time-tasting methods. In 400 pages he has arranged the savoriest moments of the last 100 years in a bill-of-fare to suit the taste of journalistic historians, history-minded journalists and plain readers. Of the 14 years he dishes up, only six are pre-1900. Some of them...
Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, spent some 35 years attempting to become Emperor of the French. He finally succeeded. But according to Historian Philip Guedalla he should have died on the day of his coronation. For the story which Guedalla told in his The Second Empire is one of anticlimax, of a nouveau riche court, a theme for irony and wisecracks, the Napoleonic legend reduced to farce. "The gaslit tragedy of the Second Empire," Guedalla contemptuously called the regime which was born in intrigue in the early 1850's, found its Empress in the granddaughter...
Alfred Neumann, German historical novelist, has evidently pondered Guedalla's book. Preferring heroics to irony, and following the career of a man who is one of the "outs," to satirizing the bigwigs of the "ins," Neumann has wisely terminated his story of Louis Napoleon in the early '50's. Another Caesar is the prelude to the "gaslit tragedy." It is a big, colorful, shrewd novel that sticks pretty closely to the actual course of history. Conversations may be invented, but the characters are all out of the past. And Neumann's analysis of personality and motive...