Word: xiv
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...pleasing a mass audience-which used to be a simple game of playing hunches but is now codified, computerized and constantly tested by market research-can only by stretching the word be considered powerful. A powerful king could do as he damned well pleased; in France, the capricious Louis XIV has been succeeded by the democratic Giscard d'Estaing, who is allowed only to be crotchety. Networks and newspaper chains are far larger than what William Randolph Hearst ruled, but Hearst was a real press lord and his successors are not. Without radio, television or national newsmagazines to contradict...
...ever a man embodied Louis XIV's legendary boast, "L 'état, c 'est moi," it was the late Algerian leader Houari Boumedienne. When he died last December, Boumedienne was not only Algeria's President but also its Minister of Defense, president of the Council of the Revolution and chief of the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.), the country's only political party. Finding a President to succeed such a pervasive figure presented a delicate problem for the eight-man council, many of whose members aspired to the post. In the end, the council settled...
Said the inconsolable chief curator of the Versailles Museum, Gerald Van der Kemp: "There has never been an attack on Versailles since the reign of Louis XIV." The palace, which is located about twelve miles west of Paris, had remained unscathed during the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870, as well as during the first and second World Wars. Responsibility for the bombing was claimed by three extremist groups: Unemployment International, the Revolutionary Worker Group and a military wing of the Breton Liberation Front. French authorities took the Breton claim seriously. A telephone tip turned up a letter from the Breton...
Charpentier: Te Deum, Magnificat (King's College Choir, Cambridge, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Philip Ledger, conductor; Angel). Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1634-1704) wrote brilliant religious music for Louis XIV that is seldom heard today. This recording celebrates Charpentier's majestic trumpet flourishes and garlands of intertwined, polyphonic passages. The resplendent voices of the King's Choir-recorded in the King's College 500-year-old chapel, with its perfect acoustics-would have pleased the Sun King...
...Executive Office Building, one fellow who deals in tax matters dug out the line from Jean Baptiste Colbert, the tax collector for Louis XIV, who set the tone for all that followed him: "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." So far, he reckons, Country Boy Carter has plucked well, though there surely is some hissing in the background...