Word: victoria
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...mother, Vita Sackville-West, belonged to one of England's most venerable families; Knole, their fabled ancestral home, sheltered the sort of elaborate sexual and emotional transactions fashionable among the Bloomsbury set. But the Victorian era boasted its own dramas of unlikely passion: Vita's mother, Lady Victoria Sackville, was herself the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish dancer and a Sackville heir. Courted by President Chester A. Arthur and J.P. Morgan-to name two of the more prominent suitors-she married her first cousin and embarked on a chaotic life that involved her in lawsuits, love affairs...
...Victoria was never quite at home in that world, despite her intense reverence for its grandeur and tradition. Brought up in the isolation of a rented villa, a decorous distance from her father's diplomatic post, she was put in a convent after her mother died in childbirth. Not until she was 19, when her father was appointed British Minister to Washington, did Victoria obtain a glimpse of high society. She was notably unworldly for an heiress of one of England's great families and vacillated between those polarities of temperament that her daughter described as "the gypsy...
Pepita, ostensibly a biography of Victoria's mother, offered a devastating portrait of Vita Sackville-West's own mother, a "pure undiluted peasant," whose tantrums made austere Knole echo like some Andalusian marketplace. Victoria, wrote her daughter, was "a powerful dynamo generating nothing," an imperious, high-strung woman given to firing her servants on a whim and more turbulent than Lady Macbeth. "I think perhaps you do not realise," Victoria complained to Lord Kitchener in the midst of World War I, "that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen...
Neither the size nor the complexity of the equipment deters the thieves. Alcorn Well Service Inc. of Victoria, Texas, reports $15,000 worth of gear stolen this year; latest loss: a $1,200 pair of 60-lb. elevators used to pull pipe. Says Alcorn Vice President Jimmy Hendrix: "Just about dang near every weekend somebody gets hit. They come in after dark, strip your rig, and we never recover anything...
Schmidt and Avery, certain that the Haya steelmaking process was very old, set out to trace its origins. What they found was beyond even their expectations. Last year, in excavations on the western shore of Lake Victoria, they discovered the remnants of 13 furnaces nearly identical in design to the one the Haya had built. Using radioactive-carbon dating processes on the charcoal, they found that these furnaces were between 1,500 and 2,000 years old, which proved that the sophisticated steelmaking techniques demonstrated by the contemporary Haya were indeed practiced by their ancestors. This discovery, the scientists conclude...