Word: lytton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whole generation of English readers the feeling that all the great Russians (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) wrote in the same curiously flat style. With such parental credentials, "Bunny" Garnett became almost automatically a charter member of the post-World War I Bloomsbury group, which included Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster. Those earlier friendships he wrote of in the first two volumes of his autobiography-The Golden Echo and Flowers of the Forest. In the present volume he opens, with a necrology-a list of the old familiar faces that disappeared from his world in the 1930s...
...winds, Mayan priests puffed their pipes to please the gods; the Sioux passed around the calumet to seal the peace; 16th century Frenchman Jean Nicot (whose name is immortalized in the word nicotine) promoted pipe smoking as a sure cure for ulcers; and 19th century authors rhapsodized like Bulwer-Lytton: "A pipe, it is a great soother, a pleasant comforter. Blue devils fly before its honest breath. It ripens the brain, it opens the heart, and the man who smokes thinks like a Samaritan...
Died. Victoria Mary Sackville-West, 70, genteel English authoress, a lanky noblewoman whose needlepoint prose and aloof mien made her a leading light in the Bloomsbury Group of Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf (who portrayed her as the fantastic heroine of Orlando) and who herself, though home-educated in her family's 365-room castle, penned a tapestry of 33 books, from biographies (Daughter of France) to novels (No Signposts in the Sea) and a history of nursery rhymes; in Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England...
Hughdee's representative in the sale is Lytton Gibson, a tax attorney notable for wearing rubber bands to hold up his socks. The buyers are led by a developer named Sheldon Magazine. Says Gibson: "Nothing but a bunch of longhairs and eggheads are causing all the trouble." Says Magazine: "What do they think we are building-a couple of garages or something?" Says old Hughdee, who keeps protesting his belief in free enterprise and the fact that a man should be allowed to sell to the highest bidder: "It's extraordinary, their making this fuss...
...wrote Lytton Strachey, "in which all the outlines were tremendous and all the details sordid." Certainly, in Victorian England, island swelled into Empire, man's origins retreated from Adam to ape, man's progress advanced to antitoxins and turbines. But certainly, too, there was a precipitous drop from Disraeli to pestilent drains or from Darwin to shivering streetwalkers. Characteristically, it was an age of gaslight, which lighted the dark with a baleful glare, but produced furtive, disquieting shadows...