Word: sirring
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sir...
...Sir...
Able, splenetic Sir Thomas Beecham had once disdained the Scots as "damned fools to throw away ?60,000 on a festival." But on opening night, before a jammed audience in Usher Hall, he was right there, ready, and with Franck, Sibelius, Brahms and Berlioz, he put on as good a show as ever. When he waved the men of his Royal Philharmonic to their feet on the fourth curtain call, they sat still; he howled at them in mock fury, then turned to the delighted audience: "You have observed, ladies and gentlemen, that this orchestra has every sort of virtue...
...make matters worse, his dead father, famed Sir Dagobert, had always been a very model of knighthood, had throttled a hawk at the age of two, killed a wild boar at six. Willie wasn't impressed by such accounts, but his mother, the Dame de Littlehampton, wouldn't let him forget them; she was the kind of lady who expected her only son to make his mark on the armor and the life expectancy of his foes. When she hustled poor, terrified Willie off to join King Richard's crusade in the Holy Land, militant Christianity enlisted...
More, he rescues a rich maiden from pirates in the Mediterranean, marries her and comes home in triumph to tell his dominating mamma where she can get off. Sir William and Despina didn't live ever after, but they did live for quite a while and got along fine. To readers who know 41-year-old Osbert Lancaster's irreverent books on English architecture and his tartly urbane Classical Landscape with