Word: throned
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...Throne of Skulls. Montevideans' cheerfulness reflected not only the coming of spring but their confident, year-round belief that democratic, Nebraska-sized Uruguay is the earth's closest imitation of paradise. Beneath the remaining layer of fat stored up during Uruguay's Korean war wool boom, the economy is ailing, but most Uruguayans remain complacently sure that the country is somehow bound to muddle through. That is why there are some thoughtful citizens who seriously believe that what Uruguay needs is a wakeup, shake-up type of crisis...
...nation lived through crises aplenty in its turbulent, trigger-happy youth. Writing of the 19th century Uruguay that he knew as a boy, William Henry (The Purple Land) Hudson called the presidential chair a "throne of human skulls." But in modern Uruguay, Latin America's most solicitous welfare state, the office of President no longer exists; its power has been diffused in a nine-man federal council on the Swiss model. Public-school children wear an egalitarian uniform of white smock and blue Windsor tie. The state pensions citizens off at 60. Even the rich get a break: Uruguay...
...closer to the Queen than almost anyone else." According to the reporter, the man who gave him the ride told of a plot, designed with the connivance of Prince' Bernhard's 72-year-old German mother, Princess Armgard, to force Queen Juliana off the throne. "Lies about the Queen's private life," said the man, "are being spread in a deliberate and nasty way with but one aim-to put Princess Beatrix [the eldest daughter of Juliana and Bernhard] on the throne, with her father and her paternal grandmother at her side." A quick check...
...standard theme, he works variations-and even a fantasia-upon it. He can jiggle his royal puppet in the classic role of the Patriot King; he can even make a kind of If-I-Were-King of Magnus. The Socialist Bernard can act a Strong Man on the throne, a Passionless Shepherd in the boudoir. The disbeliever in monarchy can suggest that a constitutional monarch be flagrantly unconstitutional, and can have him retain his throne by threatening to abdicate and prove ten times as troublesome in Parliament...
...notions were pooh-poohed by his mother and most of her ministers, who worked stubbornly for an entente with Germany. Bertie's views did not prevail until the heirs of Bismarck made it clear that Germany intended to expand at Britain's expense. Bertie came to the throne in 1901, and from then until his death (1910) "there was scarcely a diplomatic move ... which did not receive his active help." What Author Cowles suggests is that Bertie, the monarch who preferred women to men and acted by hunch and instinct, ended by very nearly proving "that kingship...