Word: somersets
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Powers of Bitchery. As Elizabeth Bowen's new novel (her first since 1955) opens, the little girls have become sad-eyed, sixtyish English gentlewomen. Dicey is now Dinah Delacroix, a handsome if slightly dotty widow who lives on her Somerset estate in equivocal intimacy with a cross-eyed, 19-year-old Maltese manservant. Remembering the buried treasure chest, she rounds up her long-lost friends and informs them that it is time to dig up the box and rediscover their old happiness...
...Somerset Maugham has repeatedly-and plausibly-denied that he was attempting a portrait of their marriage in Cakes and Ale. Maugham's warmhearted Rosie bears no resemblance to Emma, and her aging novelist-husband only sketchily resembles Hardy...
...kept asking, "Is this a record?" To answer them, Dr. Flack did a great deal of digging, and eventually he settled on the case of Hilda Gosney, who was born April 19, 1906, at Knottingley in Yorkshire, when her mother (as attested by the birth certificate on file at Somerset House in London) was 53 years, 7 months and 12 days old. Nobody seems to have bothered to ask Mr. Gosney's first name, but it is recorded that he was 75 at the time. And the record-breaking mother lived to be almost 94. The child...
Marlborough's first break came in 1948 when a young art buff named David Somerset, the son of the heir presumptive to the Duke of Beaufort, joined the staff. "He's related to half of the English aristocracy, and they entrusted him to sell their masterpieces, all blue chips," says Harry Fischer. On their own behalf, the founders landed some handsome commissions from sales of major collections on the Continent, and they have used their capital with devastating shrewdness...
...dubiously behind. Then he was whooping and laughing and fast-stepping, next trotting, and finally he broke into a full gallop across the field with the whole camp of 600 streaming along in joyful pursuit. Mused one observer: "A regular Pied Piper." · · · For a year now, Somerset Maugham, 89, growing ever more crotchety with age, has been trying to disavow Lady John Hope, 47, the daughter with whom he has been feuding, and to disinherit her in favor of his longtime secretary-companion Alan Searle. Last week a Paris court, operating under both British and French...