Word: moorish
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...white taxis, you suddenly come upon the cathedral, rising with ancient majesty over the Irish pubs and Heladerias (ice cream shops) around it. Its construction spanned a century (I forget which, though I did take the tour) in the Middle Ages, and beside it stands the Giralda, a Moorish tower that is even older. Its flying buttresses arch against the blue sky like a tangible dream of medieval times, the proverbial Spanish castle, its grey stone begrimed with the sweat of 20th century traffic...
...social history when ambition and new wealth outstripped utility and taste. Dressler's Grand Cosmo, an architectural and cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism," Dressler's folly fails spectacularly, a case of too much too late. In the end Dressler completes the illusion and his ruination by hiring actors to play customers...
...that feels like scepticism: the magical may also be coincidental. This sophisticated, even jaded approach to the exotic, the "Oriental", is Rushdie's singular gift. The novel's narrator, Moraes, shares this detachment: "Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns...can this really be India...
...liaisons with actresses: Welles wed three, Hearst one. For decades, while his papers denounced Hollywood morals, the old man lived openly with Davies, a comedian he foolishly tried to remake as Garbo. She stayed with him, good times and bad, in San Simeon (the "Xanadu" of Kane), his Spanish-Moorish-Italian "ranch" crammed with four millenniums' worth of trophies. It was your crazy uncle's attic, half the size of Rhode Island...
Along the streets, we catch the haggard, unslept faces of the besieged, a glimpse of their trudging, cringing body English. Shops boarded up. The driver, who is, improbably, a Russian, pitches the Renault along, overrevving and popping the clutch, to the National Library. It is a splendid 19th century Moorish building that has been hammered so often, so heavily, that it is a gutted shell. In a city where more than 17,000 have been killed and 110,000 wounded since the siege began last spring, it may be odd to be disturbed by the fate of a building...