Word: splendid
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Outside the great conference hall in Nairobi, 16 fountains sent up sparkling plumes of water, and black Mercedes limousines glistened in the bright East African sun. Inside, some 1,500 delegates from 110 nations sat in air-conditioned comfort. The splendid setting of the meeting could hardly have clashed more jarringly with its purpose. At the U.N.'s invitation, the representatives had gathered in the Kenyan capital last week to discuss and devise ways of containing what an increasing number of experts regard as a major environmental danger: the creeping, seemingly relentless spread of the earth's deserts...
More striking than the number of vans is what the vanners do to them. The workhorse vehicle formerly coveted mainly by plumbers and other craftsmen winds up as a convertible den-bedroom-kitchen within and a showcase of accessories on the outside. Furnishings are usually elaborate, often splendid. Probably nine out of ten custom vans carry eight-track stereo, and crushed-velvet upholstery is not all that unusual. Neither are stained glass windows, wine racks, built-in television, fake fire places. Mirrors are very popular-on walls and ceilings. A few vans even boast chandeliers. Some rigs cost...
...Mitford sisters did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent them. Their splendid improbability makes his ongoing saga of the decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner...
...people, however, he was warm and effusive. Although he suffered a mild heart attack earlier this year, Cypriots were unprepared for his death. The vigorous archbishop had never really designated a successor. The mourning, as a result, was electric as Greeks filed past the bier, where he lay in splendid gold crown and mantle. The Greek Cypriot government declared a 40-day mourning period...
...trying to prevent construction of a gym near the spot where four students died. Sometimes the '60s reappear as a waxworks item of nostalgia: four young men each night take the stage of Manhattan's Winter Garden to impersonate the Beatles of long ago. Or else a splendid fable of arrogance brought low: those who warned "Never trust anyone over 30" are now losing their hair. The wife of Troubadour Bob Dylan ("something is happening here but you don't know what it is do you Mister Jones?") divorced him because she said that, among other things...