Word: parvo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Portraits in Miniature is a short book (214 small pages) but contains 18 biographies in parvo. They are like unusually well-written, extremely urbane short stories. Some of their subjects: Elizabethan Sir John Harington, who, "suddenly inspired," invented the water-closet. Jacobean Dr. North, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), whom illness transmogrified from a scrupulous moralist into a ribald debauchee. The Président de Brosses, the man who got the better of Voltaire over a bill for firewood. Mary Berry, last survivor of the 18th Century, who "could even make Frenchmen hold their tongues; she could even make Englishmen...