Word: virago
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Sharett's successor, bustling, Russian-born, Milwaukee-bred Golda Myerson is only the second woman in history to head a nation's foreign ministry (the first: Rumania's Communist virago Ana Pauker). She is expected to keep the place tidy and to give Ben-Gurion no trouble...
Bishop Sheil made himself just as unpopular with fringers on the right as with those on the left. At one forum on Christian-Jewish relations he was viciously heckled by a delegation of Christian Fronters, and a virago pushed her way towards him as he was leaving. "I'm a Catholic!" she screamed. "You're not a Catholic-you're a nigger-lover and a Jew-lover. You call yourself a bishop. You're not a bishop, you're a rabbi." And she spat in his face...
Fustilarian was the word used by Falstaff to describe Hostess Quickly. It is "a comic formation based on fustilugs, and fustiluggery itself refers to fat and frowsiness, usually feminine. Fustilug [and] fus-tilarian certainly merit rediscovery . . . for application to a gross virago...
Orwell saw the world divided into rival dictatorships. Britain, freedom's old home, is "Airstrip One" and its people, A.D. 1984, are controlled in every thought and act by Big Brother. Winston Smith, the pathetic hero, wakes in the morning to compulsory gymnastics directed by a virago who can see him from a two-way "telescreen" which takes pictures as well as projects them.* Winston's day is spent falsifying history to suit Big Brother, and when Winston rebels, Big Brother has ready for him a deeper slavery. There was a real danger that the trapped, submissive Winston...
Some of the men & women the book deals with: the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough ("the courtliest man of his generation had married its most abusive virago"); Robert Walpole ("a great spoke in the Philistine wheel and a heavy stone in the capitalist edifice"); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ("her personality, though it had its inconveniences while she lived, is exactly the sort that is welcomed in the dead"); John Wesley (who "was that fascinating type of fanatic-the 'rational' one ... 'I think,' said his father of him as a boy, 'I think our Jack would...