Word: splendor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nikolai Gogol was one of those truly bizarre characters who appeared in. and occasionally wrote, the great Russian novels of the 19th century. He was born of Ukrainian Cossack stock into that great shambling mess of splendor and squalor, the Russian Empire. The society must have had something in it of Elizabethan England (with its preoccupation with theology, place and power, and its spiritual ferment). To this was added a fantastic, ramshackle bureaucracy with bewhiskered officials dedicated to the ledgers of obscurantism. Gogol's own parents typified that society. His mother was a pious, eccentric ninny; his father...
Portraitist Morse had once hoped to "be among those who shall revive the splendor of the 15th century." The son of a stiff-necked Yankee pastor, he conceived the notion that art can be purely "intellectual." While Morse was at Yale, President Timothy Dwight regularly admonished his students against all kinds of fun. "Recollect," Dwight would cry out, "that you are to give an account of your conduct at the last day." Samuel Morse felt quite at home in this stringent atmosphere. Along with painting, he dabbled in electricity, which alarmed his father. "Your natural disposition,'' warned...
...relate the chapel to the academy's other buildings and its majestic mountain backdrop. The solution is an ingenious example of contemporary Air Force Gothic. Rising tall and bright in its sheath of man-made aluminum against the surrounding peaks of the Rockies, the chapel stands in solitary splendor, its 19 spires soaring in contrast above the flat-roofed buildings spread out on the campus. It is built on two levels, has three naves. On the lower level rear is the Jewish section, seating 100; at the front the Catholic section, seating 500; on top the 900-seat Protestant...
...work his magic-make disciples out of followers and converts out of adversaries and victory out of defeat-not because he is a Southern hero in the Senate but because he is a Senate hero who happens to be from the South. He basks in the tradition, the reticent splendor, the interplay of interests, the quests for compromise of the chamber that have been called a Southern institution. With incomparable style he translates his Southern virtues and personal virtues-courage, courtesy, consistency, consideration for others, hard work, good faith, sense of history-into the equipment needed to belong to, even...
...European playboy. His bland face and portly (240-odd Ibs.) figure, resembling those of a large and benevolent turtle, were constantly caught by news cameras-at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, on a fashionable beach at Cannes, at a lavish masquerade ball in Venice, or amidst panoplies of Oriental splendor as devoted followers balanced his weight in gifts of diamonds, gold or platinum on Moslem feast days. Readers of the sports page knew the Aga Khan as an ardent turfman whose stables had produced five Derby winners. (The day before his death, a thoroughbred named Damseesa, carrying his flashy...