Word: queene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wisdom, all were unexceptionable. The United Nations lowered its flag to half-staff?an unprecedented tribute to one of Kennedy's modest official rank. Pope Paul announced at a formal audience the shooting of the junior Senator from New York. Condolences came from Charles de Gaulle, Aleksei Kosygin, Queen Elizabeth, Marshal Tito and scores of other world leaders...
...years, his salon on Avenue George-V was the very citadel of haute-couture, and Cristobal Balenciaga, 73, was its lofty priest. The son of a Basque fisherman, Balenciaga created a legend rich in grace and splendor; elegant women-the Duchess of Windsor, Barbara Hutton, Queen Fabiola-cloaked themselves in the simple yet sumptuous designs that were his trademark. Thus the entire fashion world lost some of its sheen last week at the news that the House of Balenciaga is closing. Some said he is simply bored; others claimed that his disdain for "commercialism" and contemporary styles had caused business...
...KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. 272 pages. McGraw-Hill...
Actually, his later novels, notably Lolita and Pale Fire, are far more elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic...
...important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly he once discovered in the French Alps: "It may not rank...