Word: macaulay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Writers have often thought of the Constitution in nautical terms, a motif probably suggested by the image of the ship of state. In 1857 Macaulay told an American, "Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor." (A foreigner's elegant remark. Others suspect that the Constitution has entirely too much anchor -- too many checks and balances -- to make any headway at all.) The sociologist David Riesman likens the Constitution to the shallow keel of the national ferryboat, on which the passengers keep shifting from port to starboard and back again. One might also suggest the image of a trimaran...
...Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay...
Writers, artists and beauties flit through Quennell's pages like guests at one of Lady Ottoline Morrell's parties. Here is George Orwell, with his face of "haggard nobility"; Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, "clever, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned, close-lipped"; and Rose Macaulay, telling a friend at the end of her life, "I think I'm going to die in a fortnight. When are you pushing off?" Quennell writes affectionately of Artist Augustus John, with his gypsy ways and tribe of illegitimate children; John was immensely popular in his heyday, yet "had nothing of the fatuous outward...
...throw his voice. The disembodied sound has a life of its own, like Gogol's nose, appearing on the moon, at the circus and even at school, where it spouts wisdom like "Alaska is the President of Brazil." David Lord Porter's whimsical prose and David Macaulay's antic drawings combine to sustain an air of credible lunacy to the indisputable punch line: "Be careful what you throw away. You might want it back...
...Socialist I suspect.' Amusing for about a quarter of an hour." Here is Graham Greene delighted when a bomb from the blitz hits his house, symbolizing not only the end of his estate, but of his marriage; Arthur Koestler, "all antennae and no head," and Novelist Rose Macaulay "looking immensely aged, everything about her having diminished except her false teeth...