Word: victorians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl"), Britain's bestselling Poet John Betjeman, 55, lit out for Australia in November all clutched up: "I could not write and was afraid to try; I felt I was finished." But last week, back in London again, Latter-Day Victorian Betjeman felt himself once more summoned by belles. "Australia," he glowed, "is a wonderful country with a wonderful future, magnificent oysters and wines, and athletic girls of the type I like best-with long hair and legs, and turned-up noses...
...wrote Lytton Strachey, "in which all the outlines were tremendous and all the details sordid." Certainly, in Victorian England, island swelled into Empire, man's origins retreated from Adam to ape, man's progress advanced to antitoxins and turbines. But certainly, too, there was a precipitous drop from Disraeli to pestilent drains or from Darwin to shivering streetwalkers. Characteristically, it was an age of gaslight, which lighted the dark with a baleful glare, but produced furtive, disquieting shadows...
...Victorians everywhere moved between the illimitable and the unmentionable, their arms outstretched toward vast new horizons, their eyes averted from the simplest barnyard facts. Theirs was the pre-eminent age of the railway, the morning newspaper, the club, the waltz, and eventually the tea party. But it was the age, above all, of an entrenched middle class and hence an enthroned respectability. Men were known to play tennis in top hats. The Biblical historian. H. H. Milman, was ostracized for calling Abraham a sheik. The Victorian Sunday was as cheer less as a steel engraving; the Victorian matron went swathed...
Rejected Crown. The biggest and most elegant new casino is named Crockford's, and in tradition and atmosphere it does not recall "Monte" so much as the pre-Victorian London of rip-roaring Regency bloods. In its heyday, Crockford's was the acknowledged heaven of gambling hells. Benjamin Disraeli, who had to wait six years before being elected to membership in 1840, likened its original building in St. James's to "Versailles in the days of the Grand Monarch.'' It was a favorite haunt of politicians, and the Duke of Wellington instinctively repaired to Crockford...
...WHITE NILE, by Alan Moorehead. The last half of the 19th century saw the Nile traced to its sources and the vast, hostile area it drained subdued by such peculiarly Victorian heroes as Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, "Chinese" Gordon and Kitchener. A too-brief book that is the most readable of the year's popular histories...