Word: thrale
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Characters here are, as an airport sign reads, "Passengers in Transit," moving through emotions alone, along intersecting orbits in mechanical mystery. When staid government official Christian Thrale meets orphan Grace Bell at the symphony, two strangers' historical curves come together and fall into relation...
...that Author James (Career) Lee's mannered and meticulous TV adaptation of The Life of Samuel Johnson really caught fire. Though there was little dramatic continuity to Boswell's massive chronicle, the scenes that Omnibus selected-a rowdy night at Drury Lane, a fashionable gathering at Mrs. Thrale's home, a packed Old Bailey courtroom-were charged with both drollery and drama. For, more than any other Englishman, Sam Johnson raised "a life of talk to the level of a life of action...
...they had more than 1,000 additional manuscript pages from the Life of Johnson and Tour to the Hebrides. There were also such tidbits as a report to Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Boswell's own love affairs, and a verdict on Dr. Johnson's old friend, Mrs. Thrale (". . . For all her care and attention she was amply repaid by the gratification of her vanity in having so great a man ... to use, as it were, in her possession...
...eighteenth century novelist with fairly detailed studies of many of her close and not-so-close acquaintances. By this transparent device she manages to write a great deal about people intrinsically far more interesting than Fanny herself, notably Fanny's Father Charles Burney, the fashionable music teacher, and Hester Thrale, the fascinating woman who lodged Dr. Johnson for many years. This gallery of piquant people is what makes the biography so entertaining...
Weeping King. With Mrs. Thrale married and Dr. Johnson dead, Fanny was at a loss, but in 1786 a place was found for her among Queen Charlotte's ladies in waiting at the court of George III. Her journal gives a picture of the daily life of the sober, dull King and ugly Queen, with their love of housekeeping and bargains. Charlotte rejoiced in a book bought well below cost at a second-hand stall; George loved to beat down the asking price of a load of hay for the royal stables...