Word: etonisms
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Aldrich's choice of Cambridge in this epoch belies the apolitical face he presents us. Not only was there an abundance of exuberant self-confidence in those years, but the student body was tip-top as well, all boys of good blood and fine manners, up from Eton and Harrow or straight from their private tutors. Back then, you simply did not have to trouble yourself with great numbers of people less confident then you, people like the sons of workers, or women, or the other outsiders referred to in England as "Wogs." They must eave been grand old days...
...crime seemed like a grotesque parody of Upstairs, Downstairs. Richard John Bingham is the seventh Earl of Lucan, an Irish title dating from 1795. He made gentleman's marks at Eton, joined the Coldstream Guards, then prepped at a London bank until one spectacular night 15 years ago when he won $56,000 at chemin de fer. After that, "Lucky Lucan" became an inveterate gambler...
What possessed Shelley? Holmes has tried to find the answer by retracing a path trampled flat by idolaters. After a pampered, precocious childhood filled with adoring sisters, gothic novels and the promise of an inherited baronetcy, Shelley was thrust into a Dickensian boarding school. At Eton, his refusal to kowtow to senior students earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley." There followed University College, Oxford, which gratefully expelled young Percy Bysshe, after a scant six months, for writing a broadside on atheism...
...writer of those pieces never wasted a line. The only thing he seemed to squander was his life. The heir to a relentlessly middle-class colonial tradition, Orwell gained a scholarship to Eton, then made a false start as a policeman in Burma. Out of that five-year catastrophe came the embittered radical who could dissect his emotions and his country with pitiless surgery...
...King, who was educated at Eton and once studied at Harvard, also made it clear that the monarchy would remain absolute, even though he has set up a commission to study the possibilities of democratic reform. "The throne," he insisted, "embodies this country's sovereignty, integrity and national dignity...