Word: royal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...History isn't supposed to repeat itself so quickly, but George W. Bush's tardy response last year to Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast echoed almost exactly the lethargy that enveloped the Royal Family of Britain eight years before, in the days following the car crash that killed Princess Diana. Like Bush in Crawford, the Queen stayed holed up in Balmoral, her country estate in Scotland, while her subjects, shocked by the violent death of the blond goddess whose flaws they cherished as much as her charms, sobbed their hearts out. Strange, isn't it, how the powerful...
...movie's patina of textual and textural accuracy comes from voluminous research by the BBC Films team, including interviews with Windsor insiders, a chatty crowd. Elizabeth might be expected to run a tight ship with tight lips; but because royal scandal is a marketable commodity and the tabloid press voracious and rapacious, Buckingham Palace regularly springs more leaks than the Titanic. So you may take it as gossip gospel that Princess Margaret made the ungenerous observation quoted in the film that Diana was even "more irritating dead than alive." Morton also did a lot of asking around, and people answered...
...however accurate the portrait of the royals in The Queen, the first impression the movie gives is one of cool, devastating satire. Or perhaps Elizabeth and her family really are as drab as the film paints them! They don't aspire to glamour; they renounce it. Cloistered at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the Royal Family seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class. They might be the extended clan of Wallace and Gromit or cousins of Mrs. Proposition and Mrs. Conclusion...
...landscape like this? One whose proprietor, at age 75, is also bursting with charm and ideas. James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, where his father worked for a British textile company. After the family's wartime internment, Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge, trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force and worked at a scientific journal. He started writing for science-fiction magazines and became a leading figure in sci-fi's New Wave, which eschewed outer space for the more immediate world. "I haven't written any science fiction since the 1960s," Ballard says from his home...
...comic. In 1945, when Eric was two, his father died when coming home from the Army for Christmas; the car he'd hitched a ride in was hit by a truck. The family had few resources, so for a dozen years, from age seven, Eric was raised at the Royal Orphanage in Wolverhampton, an institution he describes as "bleakly Victorian." The school was bleak and chilly. "I was cold until I was nineteen," Idle recalled, conjuring up the deprivations George Orwell wrote in an essay-memoir of his own educational incarceration, "Such, Such Were the Joys...