Word: purdah
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...diary unfolds. There are gaps due to loss and destruction, but mainly there is a lack of adequate information about Missie herself. What was she like? What kind of life did she have after the war? In a foreword, her brother George drapes her in a biographical purdah. He says only that Marie Vassiltchikov was born in 1917, one of the five children of Prince Illarion and Princess Lydia Vassiltchikov of St. Petersburg. The family left the Soviet Union in 1919 to live in Germany, France and Lithuania, then an independent republic. During the Depression of the 1930s, Missie...
...again-off-again affair with a Gentile show girl is elevated to a grand romantic passion when all the evidence suggests that our hero was merely having a good time before he settled down with a more appropriate mate. The woman he marries is kept in figurative purdah ("She is my private love, not for publication"), though he pulls back the screen when it suits...
...threat to the other. Communism would abolish the family, and conversely, any loosening of our traditional sex roles would weaken our defense against communism. So you did not have to believe in the natural inferiority of women, or in the necessity of their natural confinement to the high-tech purdah of American middle class kitchens, to see that there was something menacing about feminism...
What worries me is that my worst fears about another four years of misery cooped up in purdah in a back room at Downing Street seem all too justified. With a 200-seat majority, can you imagine what shell be like...
...among the Baluch is in many ways the same as it was in the days of the British raj, although camels are now less prevalent than the gaily painted trucks and triwheeled scooters that chug asthmatically around the streets of the province's capital, Quetta (pop. 250,000). Purdah (seclusion of women) and arranged marriage are accepted practices in this strict Islamic society. The chief source of relaxation is bung, a finely ground concoction of high-powered local marijuana that is chewed like tobacco or drunk as a herbal infusion. Tribal values revolve around honor, which the Baluch will...