Word: prussia
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...Levron seems to suffer from biographer's lens, a distorting disability that makes the writer's subject loom through history at elephant size while other personages appear as ants. Describing the Seven Years' War, in which Austria and France were eventu ally drubbed by England and Prussia, Levron somehow creates the impression that Mme. de Pompadour was fighting the war singlehanded-writing almost daily letters to generals on all fronts, conniving with the Viennese court, desperately trying to put a little pluck into her King and his flagging ministers, many of whom, Levron admits, she had chosen...
...Duke Max lived to see the opera house rebuilt, and by the time his grandson, mad King Ludwig, was on the Bavarian throne, productions there had reached such a pitch of grandeur that the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde was largely responsible for Prussia's defeat of the Royal Bavarian Army in 1866; after the opera, there was no money left for the guns. The defeated Ludwig, bewitched by Wagner, staged three more premieres before he succumbed to a paranoid fear of crowds that kept him away from opening nights. "Each time I enter my box," he said...
Kindred Spirit. There has never been any compromise in Grafin Donhoff's life. When World War II engulfed the family castle, Friedrichstein, in East Prussia, its chatelaine joined the German underground, made regular weekly clandestine trips to Berlin, and played a role in many an assassination plot against Hitler. At war's end, after the partition of Germany, the Grafin traveled to Hamburg on horseback, a 500-mile journey that took her two months...
...conspicuous success. One of their liveliest members is handsome Prince "Alfie" Auersperg, who was down to his last Schloss a few years ago; today he boasts a priceless collection of French paintings and a U.S. heiress for a wife. Because the Bavarian aristocrats have traditionally been less exclusive than Prussia's patricians, Munich today is one city in which the rival elites come together. Munich's jet set, composed of the nouveau riche and the ancient upper crust, shuttles between St. Moritz and Egypt's resort of Helwan. Its reigning beauty is the statuesque blonde daughter...
Among other forebears of the Queen, not all recognized by Burke's, are Shakespeare, three clergymen, an innkeeper, Frederick the Great of Prussia, a plumber, and Spain's11th century hero, Rodrigo (El Cid) Diaz de Bivar. Elizabeth's surviving kinsfolk include eight-year-old Kira Alexandrine Harris of Amarillo, Texas...