Word: thrones
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...tiny attic chambers where the housemaids -- whose salary Prince Albert, shortly after marrying Victoria, cut from about 45 pounds to 12 pounds a year -- used to sleep, and perhaps still do. What you get for your 8 pounds is a walk through the main formal rooms: the Throne Room, the Picture Gallery, the Green, Blue and White drawing rooms, the best of which were designed by George IV's architect John Nash, and the worst by his pupil, Edward Blore. "Blore the bore," as he came to be known, took over the decoration of Buckingham Palace after Nash was dismissed...
...reason why the Throne Room, the red chamber where knights are dubbed beneath a plaster frieze of roly-poly figures enacting scenes from the Wars of the Roses, is so curiously ungrand. Not all of that is Blore's fault -- the squat thrones themselves, one with EIIR embroidered on it and the other with P for Philip, were done in 1953 and look Hollywood-Ruritanian, if not suburban. You can't help reflecting on the amount of lobbying from aspirant title seekers that has focused on this red room over the past century...
...best thing in the Throne Room is its ceiling by Nash. In fact the best thing about the whole palace, architecturally speaking, is Nash's ceilings. This is just as well, since the floors are unspeakable. The Aubusson carpets have been rolled up and put away -- you can't have twice 5,000 feet shuffling across those every day for two months. In their place are hundreds of yards of new Axminster in industrial-strength reds, which clash strenuously with the green or blue silk on the walls; it looks as though the House of Windsor got a discount deal...
With his Ricky Nelson profile, Roy Orbison pipes and Elvis Presley moves, Chris Isaak could easily be dismissed as a pretender to the retro throne, a rockabilly Milli Vanilli coasting on his looks and the popular pining for the spirit of rock 'n' roll past. But as anyone who has listened to his records or seen him perform knows, Isaak is the genuine article: a pompadoured anachronism who grew up in the blue-collar cow town of Stockton, California, listening to Dean Martin, Louis Prima and Hank Williams Senior. By putting a cutting-edge gloss on a vintage 1950s...
...other countries, is often related to conflicting demands posed by careers and marriage. She is also no stranger to stories involving the Japanese royal family, having contributed to our coverage in 1990 of the wedding of Prince Akishino and of Emperor Akihito's ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne. While all this background proved to be essential grounding in reporting our story on next week's marriage of Crown Prince Naruhito and former diplomat Masako Owada, it did not quite reach into the, er, heart of the matter. "The topic of most interest to everyone was why a Harvard- and Oxford...