Word: mistressing
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...come to epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was François Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien régime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense of rococo art published almost a century after the death of Boucher, "French...
Throughout the thirty years of his scientific romances and prophecies Wells was in a constant state of emotional flux. His first marriage to his cousin, Isabel, in 1893 lasted only two years. He then married his mistress, Amy Robbins, and soon asked her to "accept" his promiscuous ways with other women. She accepted it, but certainly Wells's life was profoundly affected by his short-term infatuations. The MacKenzies explore his wanderlust as one of his deep-seeded conflicts between rationalism and irrationalism--and this seems to make a great deal of sense. Wells always saw in science both...
...Real Love." Carlotta played mistress (a little), mother (a lot), as well as efficient housekeeper and secretary. She intercepted O'Neill's mail, censored his clippings, and jealously screened his friends-especially women. Half a dozen innocent conversations with O'Neill put a very young actress named Patricia Neal on Carlotta's enemy list. Years later, when Miss Neal, then a star, was about to be signed for a revival of Desire Under the Elms, Carlotta vetoed the casting. Yet by her fanatical possessiveness Carlotta gave O'Neill both the protection he needed...
...political decadence in Germany before World War II. The excellent Peter Finch appears as a brassbound industrialist named Krogh who traffics with the Nazis to sustain and increase his fortune. Michael York, who apparently wandered in from Cabaret still wearing his costume, impersonates the brother of Krogh's mistress (Hildegard Neil). There is much solemn and oblique conversation about impending crises, and the feeling prevails that the director, Peter Duffell, was rather too impressed with The Damned. There is, however, a splendid supporting performance by Michael Hordern as a quintessentially seedy journalist. If only the movie as a whole...
...death, their son Nigel Nicolson, by then a London publisher and M.P., unlocked a Gladstone bag hidden in Vita's tower writing room. In it he found her 1920-21 memoir of an intense three-year affair with Violet Keppel, an iconoclastic redheaded girl whose mother had been the mistress of King Edward VII. The occasionally purple memoir, written when Vita was 28. makes up about a third of this book. Along with it Nigel Nicolson offers biographical annotations and an elaborate tribute to his parents' "perfect marriage...