Word: personae
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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This is as it should be, for George VI is to emerge after many exhausting hours of ministrations by the Archbishop of Canterbury and others as officially a persona mixta or "mixed person." In the eyes of faithful, devout members of the Church of England, His Majesty is henceforth a mixture of priest and layman. He has been anointed with holy oil or balm as a bishop is consecrated, and upon his head has briefly rested what is called St. Edward's Crown. This is too sacred to be worn in the open or seen...
...suppose that the whole point of a coronation must be that somebody is crowned. There have been British coronations for 1,000 years and until comparatively recent generations the whole emphasis was on the "anointing" of the King, as a newly created bishop is anointed-thus making him a persona mixta or "person of mixed nature," part layman, part priest. Queen Victoria was of the opinion that she was the head of the Church of England, virtually a female Pope. Although Prime Minister Gladstone gently dispelled this impetuous pretension (pointing out certain ambiguities in the Coronation ceremony), Her Majesty...
Robert Frost should be persona grata to two opposing parties: Yankees who never touch poetry and poetry-bibbers who shy at Yankees. For Robert Frost has a foot in both camps. New Englanders who pride themselves on their conservative shrewdness and rock-bound individualism think they recognize him as one of themselves; and poets know he is a poet. His prosiest lines are often lifted into verse by some piece of sly wit or canny wisdom, and at its best his poetry is as strong and simple as his Vermont landscape...
...talent of Mr. Bontemps is considerable. He has the authentic skill of the novelist in choosing a theme likely to interest readers, in telling a story not in propria persona but through the words and actions of characters; in fact he has every gift to commend him to the reader's respect except greatness. The lack of that quality in Mr. Bontemps is serious, for he has chosen for the motif of his novel the events of a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1800, and such a theme requires greatness. It is beside the point that greatness is still...
...nothing but a trap to catch recognition and that, recognition having been caught, they became scraps of paper. When the U. S. Congress ascertained the facts, it refused to appropriate the necessary $1,100,000 for U. S. Embassy & Consular buildings in the Soviet Union. Today Ambassador Bullitt, highly persona grata in Moscow, constitutes almost the sole friendly link between Moscow and Washington. Last week Comrade Litvinoff, obviously more worried than he cared to admit by the attention Mr. Howard had called to the Soviet-U. S. situation, bleated in Moscow: "The question of Communist propaganda is a stale subject...