Word: venetian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...traveled to Oxford, married Logan Pearsall Smith's sister, devoured-and rejected-the theories of Walter Pater. In Florence, he earned a bare living escorting tourists through the galleries until, in 1894, he published his Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, the first of four handy, brilliant guidebooks which netted him enough to buy a lavish 17th Century villa high above the Arno valley...
...swank Savoy got into trouble in the 1890s (its stock slumped from ?5 to a few shillings), the management asked the partners for help. By lavish spending on gaudy entertainment (for one party, they flooded the main dining room, served dinner on gondolas to the music of imported Venetian gondoliers), they boomed the value of the stock to ?20 a share in three years. This and other triumphs prompted Ritz's millionaire friends to back his fondest dream-a hotel of his own in Paris, which would be "the summum of elegance." Ritz himself saw to it that...
...play cannot succeed without a good Othello, but a better interpretation of Iago than that of Fred Graves might have redeemed the evening's procedings. Mr. Graves is an actor of some polish and a good deal of aplomb, but his Iago is a shallow study of the dissimulating Venetian. It was obvious from the faint smile on his face throughout the play that Mr. Graves was enjoying himself, in his characterization of Iago as a pret-ty clever bird. It seemed as if he were trying to justify Iago, a natural and usually unfortunate thing for an actor...
...Aspern Papers is a most lively tale concerning the adventure of a young publisher who intrudes himself, "on the footing of a lodger," into a dilapidated Venetian palazzo, where lives, with a middle-aged niece, an ancient woman who, ages before, had been mistress of the great poet Jeffrey Aspern, and who is still purported to possess a packet of love letters from him. It is the object of the publisher fellow to possess himself of these billets-an object which eludes him when the middle-aged niece, after her aunt's death, burns the letters because he will...
...moviemakers have replaced this love story of tortured velleity with one of more baroque appeal-one scarcely, however, so recognizably Venetian, American, or, to name the spade, anything. Briefly, the movie niece (Susan Hayward) is young, has led a void life caring for the old lady (Agnes Moorehead), has compensated by poring over the poet's letters, has conceived a coy necrophilia for him. By day she is the cold spinster, by night ah! with her kitten and her finch and that sill ver oubliette which holds the letters (sweet counterfeits of passion!), she is indeed a very...