Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first and last English family to occupy an Oriental throne, they fought pirates and hostile sultans, pacified headhunters and brought the white man's law to their cruel, vibrantly beautiful land in northwest Borneo. The Brooke rajahs ruled their Kentucky-size kingdom with the stern dignity of a Victorian paterfamilias, but with humanity and imagination as well; in the annals of colonialism, few dynasties have been so selflessly devoted to their subject's welfare. The first Brooke rajah was James, a wealthy, high-minded adventurer who sailed out from England to "rid the Malay Archipelago of barbarism...
...Sweetness and light" was not the best of phrases even in Victorian times. Besides, Matthew Arnold had borrowed it from Jonathan Swift. But the eminent Victorian poet-critic's oft-quoted formula for mental harmony has clung to his reputation like a sugary burr. Successive generations of collegians, coming upon it in more modern times, have turned away, convinced that Arnold's comments on the world are about as relevant to the tough-minded 20th century as those, say, of Harriet Beecher Stowe...
Unlike many a modern intellectual. Arnold did not retreat into ivory-tower es-theticism. sour stoical isolation or epicurean sensuality. Instead, in the muscular Victorian fashion, he drowned his sorrow at his loss of faith by working to keep alive a critical spirit in an age of complacency. Though his purpose was solemn. Arnold often indulged in levity that disturbed the specific gravity of fellow Victorians-and led to a cartoon by irreverent Max Beerbohm (see cut') mocking them both. The cultural history of man, he wrote in Culture and Anarchy, his most famous essay, is an interplay between...
...Mellon collection gives a fresh view of a time of stunning versatility and charm. To the English, art was a craft to be perfected with loving care, and the grace note was often as important as the thundering chord. Yet, when no longer seen through the haze of Victorian valentines that followed it, the age is shown as robust and meaty, not a time of pallid sentiment but of potency and health...
...fine moments to the show. But here I suspect much of the genius - and there are bits of action that are genius - rests largely with the stage director, David Mills. If he is responsible for the choreography of the chorus, he deserves congratulations; if he created the gestures, the Victorian self-mockery, the hands that reach out of the curtain so that things conveniently disappear, he merits...