Word: hadrian
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...equivalent of 16,000 Western printed pages. Official documents, letters, memoranda, verse and private thoughts were collected as the Venerable Record. In Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence, professor of Chinese history at Yale, has pruned and selected this record. In the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, he has created what he calls an "autobiographical biography." But it is more than that. From the Emperor's resplendent portrait on the dust jacket to the small ink drawings scattered throughout, the book is both an object of careful craft and a most imaginative example of low-profile...
...what seemed to Piranesi a wholly truthful, if not perfectly realistic inflation of scale. "These speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying . . ." So in his renderings, the modest stones of Hadrian's Tomb were translated into a crushing, megalithic rock pile that dwarfed the tatterdemalion beggars at its foot; such Roman monuments as the Pyramid of Cestius, which in real life is as inconspicuous as any pyramid can reasonably be, rivaled the Pyramid of Cheops in height and spread. This kind...
...they were taken on a two-hour bus ride through an oncoming stream of trucks, bicycles, ponies and people and past a majestic mountain range and fields green with bamboo shoots. At the crenelated, 2,400-year-old wall, Steenhoven was moved to comment: "I've seen Hadrian's Wall between Scotland and England, but it's just a pebble by comparison." Back in the capital, the visitors were taken to Tsinghua University, where Cowan and the younger players broke off to play table tennis with some of the students. Steenhoven, the Chrysler man, was invited...
...Bishop of Caerleon were splendid, though Donald Ewer as Mr. Crowe's accomplice in blackmail burlesqued the role of Jeremiah Sant with a thick Irish accent. Liza Cole, Julie Andrews' mother in Hawaii, played the warm-hearted Agnes with unabashed charm. Her reward after the wildly sentimental scene with Hadrian in the Papal chambers was a well-deserved round of applause...
What seemed lacking in Hadrian VII was a clear resolve to explore Rolfe's personality. Though we can readily laugh at what he has imagined, we are confused by a suspicion that Rolfe the man must have been more complex and brilliant than he comes across in his own fantasy. To present the man and his fantasy in one play, something had to go and it was not humor but psychological depth...