Word: xiv
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...decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner circle until she shot herself in the head the day World War II was declared...
That formulation was crucial; it signified at least the intellectual end of the era epitomized by King Louis XIV of France: "L'etat, c'est moi." Locke carried Tyrrell's idea much farther in his Two Treatises of Government, written partly as a refutation of Filmer and published just after the revolution in 1688. In the Second Treatise, Locke based all political theory upon a rationally ordered universe. The thought was not impiously secular but in fact was the re-verse?a conception of human order deriving entirely from the infinite and infinitely discoverable mind of God. Yet, in effect...
...Lawrence as the brilliantly insufferable crank, Mark Rampion, in Point Counter Point. Political debts have been paid too. One of the first romans à clef, Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène; ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649), encoded in fiction the court of Louis XIV. H.G. Wells savaged Winston Churchill under the cover of Rupert Catskill in Men Like Gods...
...week, the audience saw a troupe whose accomplishments belie its youth: the average age is 20. Tall torsos, high arms and limbs stretched toward infinity-the two dozen young dancers burst with vitality. "It's a marriage of the nobility of the Watusi with the aristocracy of Louis XIV," says Shook...
...always so. Princes and potentates once treated the toilet seat as an extension of the throne; it was from the gilded cabinet that France's Louis XIV announced his engagement to Mme. de Maintenon. (Even Lyndon Johnson was not above conducting affairs of state while moving his bowels.) Indeed, there are few places so conducive to intellectual exercise as a well-appointed bathroom. Lord Chesterfield advised his son that he "knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the call of nature obliged...