Word: monarchical
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...hobo camp Freddie meets Sam, AKA "The King of Spain," an older drifter with several past lives. He's a bit of a cut-up, this self-proclaimed monarch of the boxcars, and he brings out Freddie's nascent personality. Their relationship forms the heart of Kings in Disguise, turning the book into an unusual buddies-on-the-road story. Over the course of the story Vance keeps the relationship finely tuned by changing its nature from the beginning - Freddie needs a mentor and Sam needs a purpose in his life - through the end, as Sam becomes increasingly ill from...
...grandfather's and her father's favorite house, surrounded by members of her family. It was the season when Britons are most conscious of home and family, words that loom large and rich with meaning in their lives. It was the season also when the British monarch traditionally speaks to his subjects as a parent on matters close to all their hearts. By radio from Sandringham last week, Elizabeth told her subjects in a warm, clear voice: "Many grave problems and difficulties confront us all, but with a new faith in the old and splendid beliefs given...
...Chalk one up for the enduring enigma of royalty. Long ago, mystery added to the authority of Kings; now, the idea of monarchy is self-evidently nonsensical. How can one person picked by the lottery of birth possibly embody a whole nation? What can a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II, prohibited from exercising any real power, actually do to justify her country's steady devotion - the crowds who line up to cheer when she passes, her face on each coin and bill and postage stamp, a national anthem that beseeches God to save her? What does she really...
...There is not much she can do entirely at her own whim. Technically, she could dissolve Parliament to get rid of a Prime Minister she disliked, but it would provoke an unthinkable constitutional crisis if she tried. The great 19th-century journalist and constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot said the monarch had the prerogative "to be consulted, to encourage and to warn" the government of the day, but it is one Elizabeth II never exercises in public (unlike her opinionated son Charles). Yet she still derives power from her twin roles as head of state - the one who opens and dissolves...
...very modern," says Reid. "People don't realize it. Some people who work for her don't." Her granddaughter Zara Phillips has had a tongue stud, lived in sin with a jockey, posed for Hello! magazine and sold the rights, but the Queen is very fond of her. The monarch who said in 1955 (following the government's decision) that her sister, Margaret, could not remain a royal princess if she married a divorced man has had no qualms about her grandson William living with his girlfriend. A senior aide says she is fundamentally an optimist, "a glass-half-full...