Word: magics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most Frenchmen seem a little bored with the grandeur of De Gaulle. These days, they find glory enough in a little Gallic warrior who has a droopy yellow mustache and wears a winged beanie, whose force de frappe is not a nuclear bomb but a magic potion that contains-as a bow to the French palate-lobster. The whole nation has come to adore a comic-book hero whose name suggests a mere footnote to history. He is Astérix Le Gaulois, leader of a hilarious village of "unsubdued and irksome" Gauls still holding out against Caesar...
...mystique of kingship recedes into the mists of prehistory. Kings were not merely the well-muscled types who could grab the best females and strong-arm the rest of the tribe. They were magic-the precious contact between little groups of fearful humans and the awful forces of fertility or famine, prosperity or plague. These magic men were precious possessions, to be carefully guarded against contamination or capture. Sometimes they were incarcerated in darkness to keep them from the influence of the sun and moon, sometimes they were prevented from even touching the ground for fear that the earth might...
...idea persisted to the threshold of modern times that the monarch was a divine personage with magic powers, including the gift of healing by touch. Belief in the king's divine curative powers vanished as surely as belief in the king's divine right to rule-at least in the West. Today's monarchs can be roughly divided into three types: Europe's chairman-of-the-board king, who presides over his country but is not its chief executive officer; the tribal king of Africa and the Middle East, who most of the time still really...
Part of her secret lies in the fact that she commands a physical plasticity beyond the magic of makeup men. She has conquered more than 130 roles, from the giddy 13-year-old Natasha in War and Peace, to the 61-year-old lioness in The Lion in Winter, to the steely title role in Giraudoux's Judith. Her voice is all champagne in the comedies, darkens to cognac in the heavier roles. She is a body actress, ruling the stage with grace and power and actually seeming to lean into her lines...
...Magic...