Word: mausoleum
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Hardly any other institution in the world has been denounced, ridiculed and threatened with reform so often and so roundly as Britain's House of Lords. Harold Macmillan called it "a mausoleum." Winston Churchill went him several better, denouncing the Lords as "one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee." Plans to emasculate the upper house are just as common today as they were in Gilbert & Sullivan's lolanthe, in which the Lord Chancellor complained: "Ah, my lords, it is indeed painful to have to sit upon a woolsack which is stuffed with such thorns as these." Anachronistic...
...instead of running the Fogg as a sedate mausoleum of art, Coolidge committed the museum to expanded educational services, so that it now serves as both a display center for Fine Arts classes and a workshop for grad students studying curatorship. Coolidge came to Harvard as an assistant professor of Fine Arts in 1947, the year before he became director, and will go back to full-time teaching after stepping down from the directorship. He taught courses most of the years in between and tried to combine the museum staff and Fine Arts Faculty into a single community of scholars...
Under Louis XV, the grand gesture -that splendid self-expression of all royal stylists-degenerated so far that one royal prince built a marble mausoleum for a pet monkey named McCarthy. Similar distortions of value took place in more important aspects of public life. Diplomacy, once the French national art, so deteriorated that it came to fit the job description given by Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro: "Spread spies, pension traitors, loosen seals, intercept letters...
...proper burial has anyone had as much trouble getting interred as the late showman Billy Rose. For 20 months, Billy's mortal remains have lain in temporary storage while his two sisters, Polly and Miriam, fought with his executors over how much should be paid for his mausoleum, and by whom. Now the body has been entombed at last, in a $125,000 white granite shrine in a Westchester County, N.Y., cemetery. The inscription reads: "Billy Rose-the fabulous legend who is really real...
Lady Burton had her dead hero interred at the Catholic cemetery of Mortlake in a marble mausoleum resembling, as much as anything in marble can, a tent. She bought a cottage near by to facilitate regular visits to this marmoreal monstrosity. She hoped, like so many Victorians, to communicate with the dead. But whatever regions Sir Richard was then exploring, he failed to report back to Lady Burton at the tent. It would have served her right if he had returned just once, and burnt her biography...