Word: queene
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recent years, many biographers learned their art in the School of Debunking. But accounts of past lives have yielded to a more generous and appreciative discipline, which has led to opposite excesses. For declaring Prince Albert "comparable to Thomas Jefferson" and for insisting that Queen Victoria's Prince Consort "merits a volume as architect, designer, farmer, and naturalist," Robert Rhodes James earns highest marks in the Warts Can Be Beautiful School of Biography...
Even so, it is useful to have this work as a long-overdue antidote to Lytton Strachey's sneering, unfair attack in Queen Victoria (1921). Prince Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was, for one thing, strikingly handsome--possessed of a "beautiful nose" and "fine teeth," as Victoria noted in 1836 when the two cousins, both 16, first met. He was a dutiful, romping father. He taught the art of the somersault. He played with kites. He enjoyed having nine children in 17 years almost as much as Victoria...
Certainly they were a love match, as royal marriages go. Nonetheless, Rhodes James is forced to report, they did have their scenes. She could fly into rages and overwhelm Albert with accusations of "want of trust, ambition, envy, etc. etc." About ambition, the Queen may have been right. The Prince's first tutor observed of Albert, "To do something was with him a necessity." He formed an alliance with the Tories, thereby becoming the last occupant of Buckingham Palace to meddle in partisan politics. But despite reading and annotating Foreign Office papers until he dropped, the Prince had a modest...
Unlike her husband, who received awestruck coverage of his run of early legislative successes, the First Lady was granted no press honeymoon. "From . the beginning," she says now, "I was certainly aware that everybody was not just cuckoo about me." She was caricatured as the high-handed queen of a new Gilded Age, making a fuss over fops and froufrous just as a painful national recession was setting in. Muffie Brandon, her social secretary, was joking when she spoke of a "tablecloth crisis" at the White House, but the new concern for elegance was real. The First Lady had some...
Birgit Nilsson knew at 63 that her time had come; in 1982 the noblest of modern Brunnhildes put away her breastplate and shield, assured of a permanent place in every Wagnerian's vocal Valhalla. Beverly Sills, the ebullient American queen of bel canto, tossed off her last Donizettian roulade in 1980. Last week another of that generation's dominant divas appeared on an opera stage for the last time: Leontyne Price ended a glittering 32-year career with a vocally stunning performance of Verdi's Aida at New York City's Metropolitan Opera that proved she can still capture...