Word: lichfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...international beauties every bit as dazzling as any courtesan painted by Watteau or Fragonard. Their names tumbled out of Burke 's Peerage, the Almanack de Gotha and the Social Register. From London, there was the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur, Lady Astor, and the young dandy Lord Lichfield; from Madrid, Count and Countess de Romanones-Quintanilla, and from Rome, Donna Allegra Caracciolo. Paris sent Princess Peggy d'Arenberg and Dubonnet-Maker André Dubonnet; from Manhattan flew Marylou Whitney (with a sequined bee on her bonnet), along with Newport's Jimmy and Candy Van Alen, Gardiner...
...poet, scientist, inventor and conversationalist of formidable talent. He had, said Coleridge, "a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe," and King George III begged him to come to London as the royal physician (he refused, on the ground that he preferred to remain in Lichfield). The age's other great eccentric, Samuel Johnson, dismissed him as a provincial from an "intellectually barren" town. His current biographers tend to side with Coleridge, and there is little difference between them, but their books are less interesting as studies of genius than as revelations of the wild theorizing...
Decoction of Foxglove. All biographers of Erasmus Darwin are dependent on a contemporary account written by a poetess and neighbor, Miss Anna Seward, sometimes known as "the Swan of Lichfield." Anna carried on a lifelong flirtation with him (they exchanged playful love letters on behalf of their cats), and remembered him as a man given to "sarcasm of very keen edge" and so "inclined to corpulence" that he had to have a semicircular hole cut in the table to accommodate him at meals. "A fool," the doctor used to say to Anna, "is a man who never tried an experiment...
...type of religious experience, however humble or bizarre, is excluded; James treats them all with tender indulgence. The majestic agonies of Augustine are followed by the fussy gropings of an alcoholic. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, has a vision of blood flowing through the streets of Lichfield (where Diocletian slaughtered 1,000 Christians), and strides barefoot through the city, crying: "Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!" The doughty little evangelist Billy Bray hears the Lord speaking to him. "Worship me with clean lips," the Lord thunders. In ecstasy, Billy stomps on his favorite pipe, muttering solemnly: "Ashes...
...regard the whole idea as revolting," the Bishop of Lichfield told the House of Lords. The Archbishop of Canterbury argued that "if it is possible to look forward from the fulfillment of a still hesitant desire to an actual remarriage to a sister-in-law, that desire is more likely to grow unchecked, and even to be subconsciously encouraged." Disregarding the churchmen, the Lords overwhelmingly voted approval of Lord Mancroft's bill...