Word: manors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Acres under Glass. William Penn granted the tract (in 1702) to one George Peirce, whose descendants imported bricks from England to build a small manor, later sheltered runaway slaves. In 1906, when Du Pont bought the 950-acre estate, "Peirce's Park" was already a pretty arboretum. Du Pont money transformed it into an American Versailles. Du Pont spent $500,000 for fountains, built $2 million worth of greenhouses to put three acres under glass. Admiring the water gardens of Italy's Villa Gamberaia near Florence, he copied them at Longwood-adding lakes and canals...
...story holds pretty true to Orwell. Manor Farm is run by a drunken brute named Jones. One day the animals, incited by a wise old Middle White boar, revolt and drive Jones out. The pigs, being the most intelligent of the animals, assume the leadership of a communal democracy based on the precept: All Animals Are Equal. The most prominent pigs are Snowball and Napoleon. Napoleon drives Snowball off the farm and seizes absolute power. As time goes by, the pigs get to look more and more like people until at last, as Orwell put it, "it was impossible...
Last week General Franco and his advisers, in five black limousines, on which the usual markings of El Caudillo's ownership were concealed, traveled Spain's ragged roads to the Palacio de las Cabezas, manor house of a 100,000-acre ranch run by the Count of Ruiseñada. There, in well-barricaded privacy, Franco sat down to lunch with Pretender Don Juan (who was allowed back into Spain on a passport describing him as Count of Barcelona). It was their first meeting in six years, and Juan's first visit to Spain since the Civil...
...pilgrimage to Jerusalem, becomes blind on the way, is captured in the Holy Land by the infidel and lashed to a mill which he is forced to turn like an ox. His son Herbert le Gros, a gay blade who lives life to the hilt, meanwhile sticks to the manor, takes all the land and love he can get, and happily commits incest with his wild and passionate half sister, who hates him ("I shall . . . make his blood rot, send snakes to drink his eyes, and leeches to suck his heart...
...book is somwhat as puerile as are those of most musical comedies of the era and taste coming down to the present. But Anton Wolbrook carries off the part of an outlawed noble returned to his ancestral manor with the same dash he might have shown had he though it much mattered. Fortunately, it doesn't, because the foot-stomping music, broad comedy, handsome characters (with a few grotesque ones for conventional spice0 and universal high spirits mask the blankness of the plot. In all, there are few musicals with so much to recommend them and such a paucity...