Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Overall, Alice is a bit long, too loud here and there, and a touch gimmicky: the stage bulges with strange percussive instruments used for special effects. The large orchestra, which includes brasses fit for Mahler or Richard Strauss, sometimes sounds like an elephant loose at a Victorian tea party. The trombones, trumpets and horns often drown out Hendricks, even though her voice is amplified. Still, Del Tredici has a winning ear. The eerie whoosh of a theremin, a primitive electronic instrument, signals Alice's alarming growth. Tempos slow down and shoot forward, keys slip in and out of place...
...American readers in the eccentric love lives of the English aristocracy. Nicolson's mother, Vita Sackville-West, belonged to one of England's most venerable families; Knole, their fabled ancestral home, sheltered the sort of elaborate sexual and emotional transactions fashionable among the Bloomsbury set. But the Victorian era boasted its own dramas of unlikely passion: Vita's mother, Lady Victoria Sackville, was herself the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish dancer and a Sackville heir. Courted by President Chester A. Arthur and J.P. Morgan-to name two of the more prominent suitors-she married her first cousin...
EARLY ONE MORNING in mid-August, 400 Philadelphia policemen milled outside a ramshackle Victorian house five blocks from the University of Pennsylvania campus, awaiting orders from their superiors. The policemen knew roughly what task was expected of them before the cool morning became a sweltering summer day; they were to rout about 20 members of an organization formed by former college professors, drunks, and poets from their headquarters-home, located in an area of the city known for its semiradical population largely composed of students and working-class blacks. The police looked forward to this confrontation with this hard...
After an arrogant encounter with Bernie at a night club, Joan (who crosses the most neurotic and presumptuous qualities of a college preppie and a Victorian school marm) wallows through the play tangled in a carefully cultivated hatred of men, particularly those who have problems with premature orgasm...
Gathorne-Hardy devotes most of his book to the past 150 years, the period of the public schools' greatest influence and eventual decline. Masters like Dr. Thomas Arnold injected Victorian moral earnestness into the system. Schools became molders of character and soul. Students who had been forced to memorize the Aeneid still graduated unable to write their native tongue, but the harrowing, evangelical zeal drummed into them for years helped them become high-minded gentlemen, trained to follow their superiors and lead the lower classes. Rabid athleticism flourished...