Word: mitfordly
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...rest of this elegantly furnished, tastefully Metrocolored film, in which director Jean (A Certain Smile) Negulesco has tried to turn Nancy Mitford's nit-witty high-society farce (TIME, Oct. 15, 1951) into a conventional comedy, develops into a fairly funny, mildly sophisticated what-is-it, rather like an interpolation of The Diary of a Chambermaid with the last six books of the Odyssey...
VOLTAIRE IN LOVE (320 pp.)-Nancy Mitford-Harper...
...reading." Voltaire and his Emilie lived together with only occasional breaks for 16 astonishing years. Their uninhibited quarrels and their nonstop intellectual creativity made one of the spectacles of the 18th century-and only now has their menage had the brilliant attention it deserves. Voltaire in Love is Nancy Mitford's most searching book. On the surface it is all polish and wit; underneath it is solid history...
...police over a challenge to a duel), he discovered a new world-Pope, Swift and the Duchess of Marlborough. He was at home in the universe of Newtonian mathematics and adored everything English. Three years later he went back to France a dedicated Newtonian ("It is he." says Author Mitford, "who preserved for us the story of Newton and the apple") and a respectful admirer of "an English author who lived 150 years ago called Shakespeare ... He was quite mad, but wrote some admirable things." Back in Paris, Voltaire fell plump into the arms of the most remarkable woman...
...been in the Bastille twice, and though the governor had made him quite comfortable, Voltaire had insisted that he must not be arrested again without plenty of notice. The court of Prussia's Frederick the Great was open to Voltaire as a refuge. But it consisted, says Author Mitford tartly, "of middle-class intellectuals, cosmopolitan Sodomites and Prussian soldiers"; moreover, jealous Emilie detested Frederick for trying to lure her lover to the Prussian court. Frederick's efforts to do so make some of the funniest sections of the book. Luckily for Emilie. monarch and mocker could not always...