Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...youthful reputation as a scandalous womanizer (deserved) and as a financial charlatan (undeserved) haunted his career. All his life he was candid to the point of impudence and imprudence and maintained a totally un-Victorian intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy. His pen dripped venom. He once endowed an opponent with "the crabbed malice of a maundering witch." Justifying his casual inconsistency on an issue in Parliament, he bluntly said: "We came here for fame." When friends congratulated him on his first accession to the prime ministership, Disraeli said cynically: "Yes, I've climbed to the top of the greasy...
...golden-roofed Cathay. In the Renaissance, Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reported on China under the Ming dynasty, praised the country's "orderly management of the entire realm." In the Age of Reason, Leibniz suggested that what Europe needed was Chinese missionaries to teach "goodness." In the Victorian era, the U.S. Protestant missionary Arthur H. Smith was shocked by China's "indifference to suffering." The Chinese seemed sober, industrious, cheerful, polite and stoical. But they also seemed superstitious, hostile, unimaginative, politically passive, and arrogant toward those not blessed by Chinese birth...
Once there was an Englishman named Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore. He wrote atrocious Victorian melodramas, and it served him quite right when in 1907 his daughter Margaret married an actor chap named Roy Redgrave. The marriage was a bad show, but before it closed in Australia three years later, Roy and Margaret had inadvertently established a simply smashing theatrical dynasty. It has flourished in England for three decades, but within the last year the Redgraves have been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as the first family of stage and screen: the nearest thing to the Barrymores that...
When she was four she learned to read, and before long had found a blissful refuge in romantic Victorian novels ?about lonely little girls. She also daydreamed a good deal, and Father approved. "Like the Brontės," he says, "she lived in great islands of imagination that were entirely her own creation." Daydreams found an outlet in play acting. With Brother Corin, Vanessa performed for several years an almost daily drama in which he was an Austrian prince and she was the President of the U.S.?Daddy's girl was already ambitious. When Lynn came along...
...shadow of temperament. Wrote e. e. cummings of John Finley, "he generates a particular precision of vitality which our fathers called 'character.'" Eliot House has a vision of itself as a good and distinctive place, a mixture of Greek excellence diluted by the leisurely style of Romantic and Victorian tradition. The image attracts a certain type of boy who likes to think of himself as reserved, safely aristocratic, and casually intellectual. "The president of St. Paul's School has been here since time immemorial," says one senior. Not everyone fits the image; perhaps no one does. But it exists...