Word: xiv
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Daumier do this? By fixing his pincer gaze on the theatrics of the law. In the drawing known variously as For the Defense and The Lyric Advocate, the lawyer's court robes puff out in baroque splendor -- one thinks, perhaps not irrelevantly, of Bernini's bust of Louis XIV -- on the hot air of his rhetoric, as he gestures at the man in the dock, a Jean Valjean whose simian face betrays not the slightest comprehension of what is being said on his behalf. Emphasized by the dark mass of the lawyer's sleeve, the short distance between...
...moment, their faith is pinned on Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. He is too much the populist President to take comparisons with King Louis XIV of France very kindly. But anyone who looks at how power is wielded in Russia today cannot help seeing that, to paraphrase the boastful French monarch, l'etat c'est Yeltsin. The Russian leader never aspired to the role of Sun President, around whom everything in the realm turns. But he so dominates the political landscape that it would be no exaggeration to say that as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation...
...papacy has been making the multicultural rounds. A safe Italian followed the sharp-edged Pole, John Paul II, but then came South American, African and Asian Popes (one African American nearly made it). Finally, the Italians reinstituted their monopoly over the throne of Peter. The incumbent Italian, Pope Pius XIV, is slowly reacquiring some of the art masterpieces sold off to cover Vatican debts...
...catalog is massive, with 23 essays by various hands -- a long symposium. The '20s, Clair points out, were the first "name" decade in cultural history. In an older and slower-changing Europe, cultural periods were identified with long reigns -- the age of Pericles, Louis XIV. But now, in a time of fantastically accelerated communications and stylistic shifts, what Clair calls "the tyranny of the short term" begins: rapid identifiable packaging in culture...
...considering how high expectations were running. Just last year France looked well placed to become more than the center of gravity of a newly ascendant Europe. By some lights, it was emerging as the best of all possible worlds. Three centuries after the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and nearly two after Napoleon bestrode the Continent, Paris was confidently pulling the strings of Europe, positioning itself to be the capital of a new political-economic imperium...