Word: cockatoos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whether Bennett himself was a good or bad writer was a judgment that his sometimes awed, often contemptuous contemporaries were never able to make. Partly it was because his physical presence was so overwhelming. He was a strutting cockatoo of a man, resplendently tailored, grey hair swept up into a crest, wit as sharp as a honed spur, manner as crude as a clod. Fascinated by the combination of the baroque and the bumptious of the man, Rebecca West once wondered if it would not be better to judge Bennett as a character rather than an author. "He could...
Noblesse oblige: over the years, Prince Antony Radziwill stuck to his obligations, first as a waiter at the Blue Cockatoo in Chelsea and then as wine steward at the Hertford Hotel in London's Bayswater. Finally the noblesse paid off. To celebrate his promotion to "joint head barman" at the hotel, "Mr. Tony," whose cousin, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, is the husband of Jackie Kennedy's sister, Lee, stirred up a dry martini. Said he: "I pride myself on knowing how to make them...
...like people who feed birds in public gardens, and usually have two or three perched on their heads." But Mother scarcely foresaw the strange-feathered notions that would roost inside Graves's head. Out of this intellectual aviary fly de-crested myths, twice-tweaked Bible tales, a poetic cockatoo called the White Goddess, and great whooping cranes of scholarly controversy. As a man who travels "full-speed in the wilder regions of my own, some say crazy, head," Graves ranges airily from poetry to poltergeists, from mushrooms to Majorca (his expatriate home). Though the form changes-essay, lecture, story...