Word: royals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...royal family has never lacked for ink in the British press, especially ! in the flashier tabloids whose rival scoops are sometimes mountains built from one grain of fact. Diana, in particular, attracts headlines: over the course of her six-year marriage to Prince Charles, she has been reported pregnant countless times, has spent a king's ransom on clothes and was anorexic. Lately, however, British papers have been feasting on an unusually large banquet of negative stories about the younger royals, including once unthinkable innuendos about (gasp!) Diana's marital fidelity...
Such antics would attract notice anyway, but some observers believe that last month's departure of Palace Spokesman Michael Shea has worsened the royal family's public relations problem. Shea, who held the job for almost ten years, knew how to subdue a potentially embarrassing story and treated reporters well. His skills would have come in handy three weeks ago when the Queen's youngest son Edward organized a charity event in which he, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Fergie dressed in Elizabethan garb and raucously led teams in mock medieval jousts. Reporters were kept in a tent...
Part of the point of the program, Edward said innocently before fleeing, was to show the public that "members of the royal family are, in reality, ordinary human beings." Some commoners, however, have different ideas. "What keeps the royal family royal is the general suspension of disbelief that they are mere mortals," wrote Helen Mason in the Sunday Times. Without that disbelief, the monarchy might lose its appeal, and where would that leave the British press...
...deeply carved blockfront desk with shell motifs made by Townsend and Goddard in Newport, R.I. But American neoclassical "constitutional" furniture radiates a sense of lightness and straightforwardness; it rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic, mercantile temper. It spoke of royal courts. The desire for a general style that asserted first principles, tended toward abstraction and worshiped antiquity -- this mattered greatly to the young Republic in the 1780s...
...case, never seemed as good a political instrument to the Founding Fathers as architecture. Benjamin West (1738-1820), born in Springfield, Pa., to Quaker parents, was the first major American painter to make a career in Europe; he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. West might be known as the American Raphael, but this praise was as excessive as Lord Byron's dismissal of him: "the flattering, feeble dotard, West,/ Europe's worst dauber, and poor Britain's best . . ." He knew how to cater to Europeans' expectation that...