Word: clan
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Social standing is always relative. To the hardscrabble peasants down in the Irish village of Ballybeg, the clan in the big house on the hill is the nobility. But at Ballybeg Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal...
...Margaret Colin the one who drowned herself in the Molotov cocktail of alcohol laced with utter honesty. John Pankow excels as the village lad who romanced each girl in turn, settled for the one who would have him, and went on to a diplomatic career that eclipses the golden clan's luster in every mind but the one that counts...
ARISTOCRATS. Brian Friel's depiction of a gilded Irish clan in decline, sensitively acted off-Broadway, is the best play on view in New York City and merits comparison with Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard...
...spring meeting of the American Physical Society is normally a cool scientific congregation, but last week's gathering of 1,500 physicists in Baltimore was more like an unusually hot celebrity roast. This elite clan convened a special panel to comment on the instant fame of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists who had dared to venture from their field into the private domain of nuclear physicists. Less than six weeks earlier, Pons, of the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of Southampton, claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion, the process that powers...
Louis Auchincloss, discreet attorney to the well-to-do and subtle novelist of their mores, proposes that the period between 1880 and 1910 could be called the Vanderbilt Era, after its largest and wealthiest clan. In these portraits in miniature of family members -- plus outriders like Richard Morris Hunt, who designed their grandiose homes -- Auchincloss writes with the relaxed intimacy of a frequent houseguest. (In fact, his wife Adele is a Vanderbilt descendant...