Word: puckishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Humbert's obsession began in a dreamily distant beach resort where he met and desperately loved a girl-both being unlucky 13. Since Humbert is given to puckish literary references, the girl's name, of course, was Annabel Leigh (Poe spelled it Lee). After Humbert's early love is interrupted by shame and death, he incessantly searches for a return to that lost, childish kingdom by the sea. He searches through the mail order catalogues of Paris whoredom, through a low-comedy marriage, through Central Park-until he finally finds Annabel's reincarnation in Dolores Haze...
Potbellied and dripping, the new chairman of the Tory Party rose from Bright on's chill October sea last week and fired new hope in a Tory Party gathered for its annual conference and glumly reflecting on a dozen by-election setbacks since Suez. Chubby, puckish Viscount Hailsham, 50, only three weeks in office, delighted the delegates with his handshaking zeal, astounded them as he splashed into the ocean for early morning dips, moved them with shamelessly orotund oratory. "Britain is still recognizably a lion among nations," he roared. "I do not believe that we have been spared...
...Percy Howard) Newby, 39, is a puckish soldier turned professor, proletarian turned sahib. His The Picnic at Sakkara (TIME, Aug. 29, 1955) was a rich and penetrating fantasy of life in the Nile delta in the last hours of King Farouk. In Revolution and Roses he has moved on in time to the period when an Egyptian army clique led by General Naguib and Colonel Nasser turn out Farouk and take on the cumbrous business of governing a country that had "never had any real independence since...
Back from Denmark to resume his one-man show, this time in Los Angeles' Greek Theater, puckish Pianist Victor Borge happily described his newly purchased, 237-year-old castle near Copenhagen as "larger than Lauritz Melchior, although smaller than the Waldorf-Astoria." Called Frydenlund, the place has no ghosts or battlements (he says it qualifies as a castle because four Kings have lived there), but it does have a 1,600-tree apple orchard and a lot of modern orchard equipment, which he calculates will pay for itself "in exactly 216 years...
...drawn from a hat to settle a tie in the voting. The fact that the new chief executive of the capital city of Roman Catholic Ireland belonged to an alien faith made Briscoe a headline name throughout the world, and the new Lord Mayor's winning, puckish and amiable personality did the rest. This spring, after he returned home from a triumphant tour of the U.S., extolling Ireland and Israel (the United Jewish Appeal paid for his trip), Briscoe's place on the Irish scene seemed reasonably secure. But Irish politics are never that simple...