Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with the Ashbourne portrait which hangs in the Folger Shakespeare Library. This has lately been revealed by X-ray and infra-red pictures to be a portrait of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford . . . The Oxford crest on the signet ring is disclosed, and also, in the upper corner, Lady Oxford's coat of arms. A commoner's collar has been painted over the nobleman's ruff, and the forehead raised to the point of baldness...
...probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest...
...Convention Hall. Said he: "Mrs. Warren is out there watching what she thought was going to be a quiet performance this morning. Those kids of mine are going to be surprised." At the entrance to the hall, his three young daughters excitedly flung themselves on him, smeared his long upper lip and cheek with lipstick. He rushed on to the rostrum. Said Earl Warren: "I know what it feels like to get hit by a streetcar...
Portraits Forgotten. Late in life, he tried to change. "No more paughtraits," he once wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them, and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes." During World War I, he trundled off to try his hand at battle scenes ("I suppose there is no fighting on Sundays," he remarked to a general at the front). He tried landscapes, character sketches ("a lot of mugs in ... charcoal") and watercolors which he scornfully labeled "Triple Bosh," "Blokes," "Idiots of the Mountains," "Intertwingles." But they were never enough to free...
...scallopers took their catch to New York, where Dr. Edwin H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural History identified the tooth as the upper left third molar of a mastodon (a proto-elephant of the Pleistocene Age that tramped North America some 30,000 to 250,000 years...