Word: marquess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Marquess of Queensberry would surely approve. Just as he sought to impose rules on legal mayhem, otherwise known as boxing, so Britain's Home Office last week attempted to quantify penalties for illegal assaults. Under guidelines sent to the country's 27,710 magistrates, attackers can be forced, in effect, to compensate their victims by the punch. Sample penalties: $84 for a simple graze, $168 for a black eye, $1,428 for a broken nose, $2,940 for a fractured jaw and as much as $13,440 for a serious facial scar. Said Home Office Minister John Patten...
...1890s. This book was, as Ellmann notes, a "tragedy of aestheticism," a cautionary tale about the perils of unbridled hedonism. But the prose was so alluring that few noticed the message. Wilde ignored it too. Involved in a love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, he actively succumbed to a course of conduct that would destroy...
...deserve being caught and crushed in a murderous struggle between Bosie and his lunatic father. "The impression that has been given of Queensberry is that he was a simple brute," Ellmann writes, and adds, sounding a little like his subject: "In fact he was a complex one." The marquess, mad at Wilde and the world, threw out insults that practically begged for a libel suit. Wilde unwisely started one, lost and as a result was tried for sodomy and indecent behavior; convicted of the lesser charge, he served two years at hard labor...
...occasions, Amos admits, when the distortions of life far exceed those of art. Evelyn Waugh's scapegrace Basil Seal (Black Mischief) is based in part on an aristocrat who might have arrived from the set of early Monty Python. As a houseguest, Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, liked to borrow a pound from the butler and later tip him with it. The title character of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is a version of the author's father, a West Indian journalist. Seepersad Naipaul publicly labeled the rite of goat sacrifice...
...contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation with the unstable "Bosie," son of the Marquess of Queensberry, lands him in court and then in jail, his marriage broken, his reputation ruined. This is the stuff of tragedy, but Wilde will not have it so; the imp of the perverse follows him to the grave. Exiled to Paris, the extravagant drunk regrets that he is dying...