Word: personalia
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Frankfurter fancied himself an expert at "personalia," his word for charming, persuading and manipulating others. As a Harvard law professor in the '30s, he inaugurated the Cambridge-to-Washington shuttle, becoming one of the first of a long line of academics to serve as White House sages. While he personally stroked F.D.R.'s liberalism, he dispatched his best and brightest students, his "happy hot dogs," like Tommy ("the Cork") Corcoran, Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss, to mold the New Deal bureaucracy...
...drama; the actors wear their fixed masks and are not expected to change one mask for another in the course of the action. Over the formal masks are fitted others modeled in the naturalistic detail required by the conventions of realism. He is able to give to the abstract personalia of this theater a local habitation and a name-a habitation so truly seen in detail that it becomes more real than the town's tax rolls. But the easygoing realism that accepts wife-swapping or any impiety of evaded obligation with a sociological shrug enrages...
...Sherlock Holmes gathered legend. Finally Sir Arthur's son, Adrian, went poking about and last week the secret was out. The hatbox, announced Adrian, contained unpublished writings by Sir Arthur, including The Crown Diamond, a "hitherto unknown" one-act play about Holmes, and a mysterious manuscript entitled Some Personalia About Mr. Sherlock Holmes. This "unique document," said Adrian cryptically, would "explode the old myths" about Sir Arthur and his great gumshoe...
...Herrick broke into the Tribune in 1918. Her most spectacular job was in 1921 when she crossed the Atlantic steerage, disguised as an Irish immigrant, went through the Ellis Island mill, reported her experiences. A frequent guest at diplomatic dinners, attractive "Geno" Herrick has amassed a wealth of Washington personalia which she reports in crisp, good-humored style. Excerpts from her first columns in the News...
...There is wit, grace, fine feeling and a style which, while lively, never begs applause. The people are so real that there will be endless discussion of who is actually who: Sculptor St. George is Sculptor Saint-Gaudens, and so on. If the fabrication of fictitious letters and other personalia are remarkable, the character relations are even more so, especially the courteous, humorous, almost tender friendship between the divorced senior Lords. There is no "diddle-diddle-dumpling" about My Son John. After the prevailing diet of pink-tea fiction, John Lord and his story are strong, black coffee...