Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Died. Sir Peter Daubeny, 54, British impresario; of a brain tumor; in London. Trained as an actor, Daubeny found his stage career shattered when he lost his left arm at Salerno during World War II. He rebounded as a promoter-organizer, touring Europe, Asia and the U.S. to recruit troupes such as the Moscow Art Theater, Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble and the Martha Graham Dance Company for performances in England. In 1964 he founded the World Theater Season, which brought foreign companies to the Aldwych Theater (London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company) every spring for a decade...
There are, of course, gaffers who insist that the one true Sherlock Holmes was William Gillette, who made a career early in this century playing the detective in a drama he devised from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. There are also striplings who claim, in their innocence, that Peter Cushing's impersonation of the Great Gumshoe in the 1960s was quite acceptable. But anyone who was around in the 1940s knows that the detective's only authorized dramatic representative was Basil Rathbone.* With his incisive features and voice, Rathbone was one of the few actors...
...influence on the singers' diction, gestures and all-round Wagnerian style. Where his touch left off, Conductor Henry Holt's picked up. The Vienna-born, Los Angeles-reared Holt, 41, has been the Seattle Opera's music director for nine years. His Wagner may lack Sir Georg Solti's dynamism. But it has warmth, coherence and authority...
...Norwegian government this month came to his rescue: it agreed to buy shares in several Reksten companies for $35 million. The government will become sole owner of an oil-rig contracting firm, but Reksten will keep control of the other companies. On top of that, the Reksten tanker Sir Winston Churchill, which has been idled in the Persian Gulf for months, has received charters for two trips to Singapore. (Other Reksten tankers are named after Roman emperors, busts of whom decorate his palatial home in Bergen; his favorite is Hadrian...
Most of these stories catch authors with their wigs off or their guards down. But not all anecdotes diminish their subjects. For every example of crankiness or distemper, there is a peek at private heroism and unsuspected virtues: Sir Walter Scott dictating three novels while he writhed in agony from attacks of gallstones; Samuel Johnson quietly doing public penance for a childhood act of disobedience committed 50 years earlier; Oscar Wilde, in prison and disgrace, discussing books with his respectful jailer; Poet John Stubbs, condemned to have his right hand cut off for offending Queen Elizabeth I, lifting...