Word: isobel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While he was still a research chemist he met Isobel Swithinbank, whose grandfather introduced Eno's Fruit Salt to a more or less grateful nation. One day she came into his father's office, where Stafford was helping get out campaign literature, and asked if she could help electioneer. Since then, she has seldom left Cripps's side. Tall, blue-eyed, with fluffy, grey hair, Lady Cripps's vivacity helps melt his icy public front. In a recent interview with a reporter, Cripps was stiffly formal. To almost every question he objected: "Well, you really...
Thus spake the 17th Century's Isobel Gowdie, a Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands...
Prominent witches such as Isobel Gowdie were often members of an organized "coven" of sorcerers-men & women who assembled regularly in barren places under the direction of a "Grand Master," who was usually masked and garbed in animal skins and satanic horns. When the gang had reported on their success or failure as satanic agents since the last meeting and had finished feasting (usually on a sheep stolen from a farmer), the Master took up his reed pipe and led them in a riotous dance, which ended in a sexual orgy lasting "until the first light of dawn broke...
...pity for the helpless. He fails to close his deals with certain other clients too. He makes several brilliantly funny attempts on the life of rambunctious Martha Raye, but she was born lucky and is plainly indestructible. He nibbles interminably toward the heart and pocketbook of rich, socialite Widow Isobel Elsom-and is all but caught in his hazardous career as he is about to marry...
...pure feeling, and of observation. The set pieces of pure slapstick are as skilled and delightful, and as psychologically penetrating, as any Chaplin has ever contrived. The casting (including Victim Margaret .Hoffman) is excellent and there are a couple of dozen fine pieces of characterization and acting, notably by Isobel Elsom and Martha Raye. Working with a new character, and adapting his old, mute artfulness to a medium new and basically hostile to him, Chaplin still has his sure virtuosity; his is one of the most beautiful single performances ever put on film...