Word: noblewoman
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Died. Victoria Mary Sackville-West, 70, genteel English authoress, a lanky noblewoman whose needlepoint prose and aloof mien made her a leading light in the Bloomsbury Group of Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf (who portrayed her as the fantastic heroine of Orlando) and who herself, though home-educated in her family's 365-room castle, penned a tapestry of 33 books, from biographies (Daughter of France) to novels (No Signposts in the Sea) and a history of nursery rhymes; in Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England...
...young lady is sore, it seems, because she is a French army brat and parental love is at parade rest. Papa is a cavalry colonel, more interested in charges than children, while Mama is a Spanish noblewoman too haughty for tender talk. What daughter knows about affection comes from spying on peasant maids and their trooper lovers on a slumbering military post before World War II. And what she learns of life comes from Daddy's batman, a sporting type named Killer, whose off-duty kicks come from impaling jack-lighted wildlife on the iron spikes attached...
...unthinkable as an American. She is 80 on the day the book opens, but she is still so beautiful and witty that England's beknighted poet laureate, Sir Percy Rodiner, trots beside her, constantly begging her to marry him. Like everyone else, Sir Percy thinks she is a noblewoman of French birth, but on this day (what can a lady lose at 80?) she puts matters straight...
...Bernanos plot is based on the historical martyrdom of 16 Carmelite nuns during the revolutionary terror in Paris in 1789. The opera follows the spiritual struggles of a young noblewoman, Blanche de la Force, who has joined a Carmelite convent in Compiègne on the eve of the Revolution. Weak and fearful at first, she gradually gains spiritual strength. In a strange contrast, it is the doughty Mother Superior who dies in fear, while the once cowardly Blanche dies a glorious martyr's death; she twice spurns a chance to escape and, with other Carmelites, goes serenely...
Spate of Punditry. Through receptions and cocktail parties and all kinds of informal gatherings, the diplomats deployed to meet the needs of the crisis. "Is anyone here still speaking to me?" a bright-eyed British noblewoman pertly broke the ice one day, whereupon she was warmly and immediately reassured. Well-mannered and well-indoctrinated young embassy spear carriers were ever ready to convince their U.S. opposite numbers that they had really invaded Egypt to stop the Russians. The higher-ups concentrated on background briefing U.S. columnists and pundits-many of them still awallow in the wash of the sunken Adlai...