Word: wessex
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grassy, sheep-grazing county of "Wessex" - England's Dorsetshire -lives Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie), a typical calamity-prone Hardy heroine. Willful, flirtatious, she is pursued by men with names as solid as a Chippendale sideboard. They are Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), an impoverished sheepman; Boldwood (Peter Finch), a strange, eroded landowner of whom people whisper, warns Bathsheba's servant girl, that "he has no passionate parts"; and Troy (Terence Stamp), a seducer-soldier who has his way with any lass who meets his come-hither eyes...
...Brixton, England." On the other hand, Burke's-which sends the Queen a free copy of the $32.34 book specially bound in her favorite blue goatskin-devotes 45 pages of minute type to the royal family's doings since the days of its ancestor Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839), who was one of England's first kings and grandfather of Alfred the Great...
...thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do you to Wessex, Exeter...
...Great, the strategist who let the peasant woman's cakes burn, is the latest hero to receive the full Duggan treatment. Historical Novelist Duggan pays his respects to legend, but he is more concerned with the larger issues behind King Alfred's precarious defense of 9th century Wessex against the pagan Danes. Alfred never crushed them. But he repeatedly checked and harried them until more and more Danes turned from unprofitable raiding to settle on the land, and from their war gods to the gentle Christ. Alfred's message, and presumably its relevance for today, is that...
...Firbank was actually a great innovator, Powell suggests. Two masters of dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh, sat in Firbank's school. In fact, Firbank's exotics-improbable princesses, epicene cardinals, Caribbean market queens and so on-talk with the raw strength of Hardy's Wessex peasants. Even Hemingway's brusque and hirsute mannerisms, Powell argues, may owe something to the ambiguous ellipses of the characters in Ronald Firbank's fairy kingdoms...