Word: isabell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Murmured he: "It is my business to keep the Admiral idle." The Admiral, weathered, wrinkled, tough as a winter apple, smiled broadly. As full of energy as a boy, he is far happier when he is bouncing around on inspection tours aboard his tooth-shaking, 245-foot yacht The Isabel than when he sits in his shore office in Manila's Mars-man Building, overlooking the Bay where most of his fleet anchors. According to precedent, he should have bowed out of the Navy five months ago. But when he reached the age limit of 64, Franklin Roosevelt decided...
This is the story no less of Isabel Burton than of her spectacular husband, translator of the Arabian Nights. But she was at least a match for him. They were as daft, disarming a pair of eccentrics as boredom with Victorian England produced...
Burton was a cross between Byron and Major Hoople-a proud, fierce, foolish, gifted man with one streak of true genius -a genius for failure. Isabel, like her husband, was a rebel, but of a far more conventional sort. Her rebelliousness began like the romantic dreams of any English Backfisch; it was her great distinction that she stuck by them. And her dreams, after a fashion, stuck...
...Isabel Arundell was a poor-relation of a great Roman Catholic family, convent-schooled, country-bred. At 16 she soaked her brain in the Orientalisms of Disraeli's novel Tancred (which she reread constantly all her life); and at 16 she was deeply impressed by the following prophecy, .from the lips of a gypsy named Hagar Burton...
Damascus was too Oriental for gayety, but not for long. Isabel instituted polyglot Wednesday receptions-"there were thirty-six races and creeds and tongues." Dressed as a Moslem woman, she frequented the bazaars and harems. Their great friends were Abd-el-Kadir, an almost legendary chieftain who had held out for 15 years against the French, and Jane Digby El Mezrab, the Mabel Dodge Luhan of her time. The four of them used to have ritual evening meals on the roof, "and after that we would smoke our narghilehs and talk and talk and talk far into the night...