Word: pakenham
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...home in London's fashionable Kensington, Antonia Pakenham Fraser Pinter is a composition by Gainsborough. Her English skin would make peaches weep in their cream. Blue eyes seem to savor a secret, shared but not revealed. She is tall, not willowy but womanly, and at 57 she is, by any standard, beautiful...
...student at Oxford, Antonia Pakenham (the family name) was the centerpiece of an oh, so uppah-crusty circle. "She was already a bit of a star at Oxford," says her father. But even as swains queued eagerly for her attention, "all of the time there was a more profound, intellectual side...
Like the title of her 14th book, The Weaker Vessel, the irony in her own life is apparent. She comes from a long literary tradition. Her mother, Elizabeth, has written biographies of Queen Victoria, Wellington, Byron and Elizabeth II. Her father, Frank Pakenham, was an Oxford don and inherited his title, the Earl of Longford. Fraser's siblings are novelists and poets...
...this most seemly of chronicles begins, Powell, 28, is about to marry Violet Pakenham, 22. An opportunity, surely, for a passing brushfire of emotion, recollectec in tranquillity? Not at all. Whatever might be hot or sweet is buried in the cool shade of 13 pages devoted to Violet's family tree. Fervor, by Powell's standards is reserved for Siamese cats and the young couple's cook, a Mrs. Clara Warville, who in a passage as heartfelt as any in the book, is recalled as "an admirable exponent of the art at its simple English best...
...grim story has been told before, but never with such sweep and grieving comprehension. Part of the reason is new information, part is the skill and lineage of the author. Thomas Pakenham's mother, the Countess of Longford, is the biographer of Victoria and Wellington. His sister is Antonia Fraser, biographer of Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles II. Pakenham was able to prowl the great houses of Britain in search of long-lost letters, papers and diaries, took time to learn Dutch and Afrikaans, and early in his eight years of research recorded the memories...