Word: zaharoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pleasantest ways in which a man of wealth can lose money is to back a ballet troupe. Distinguished losers at ballet in recent decades have included the Aga Khan and Sir Basil Zaharoff (original Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo), Cincinnati's yeast king, Julius Fleischmann (Universal Art, Inc.), Manhattan's rug widow, Lucia Chase (Ballet Theatre), Boston's department-store prince, Lincoln Kirstein (American Ballet). Last week another prospective loser cheerfully bet his chips: Chilean-born George de Cuevas, onetime Marqués de Piedrablanca de Guana, who married the late John D. Rockefeller's granddaughter...
Through three volumes totaling 2,230 pages Lanny has played Master of Ceremonies for a mammoth floorshow version of 20th-century history, and in the fourth he is still one of the most adroit and likable quick-change artists in the profession. He can beard Basil Zaharoff with tips from The Beyond, josh Hermann Goring, rip off a bit of Beethoven for "Adi" Schicklgruber, rescue a beautiful Social Democrat from "Naziland" and an intrepid young Briton from the Spanish Fascists. He can carom all over "this old continent" (Europe) in his high-powered roadster, keeping dates with the major crises...
...though never to the exclusion of the view that the responsibility for Naziism is as broad as the surface of the planet. He manages to whip in a good deal of data on the U.S., England, France; on such symptomatic side shows as the Lindbergh kidnap scare, Basil Zaharoff's patronage of mediums, and the game of put-&-take played at the Geneva Arms Limitation Conference. But he draws his most serious bead on Germany, and on what happened there to his hero Lanny Budd...
...wanted to be a dramatist, but as the decade progresses he becomes a leftish journalist. Not infrequently Father Budd dashes over from Connecticut to give the U. S. businessman's point of view; he talks to Lanny about sex and a career, and to Basil Zaharoff about armaments, oil, and what wires to pull. They go to a great-many conferences-San Remo, Spa, Cannes, Genoa-where Sinclair introduces vignettes of Steffens, Mussolini, Litvinoff, and a sweet-tempered scorching of Harding's Roman Ambassador, Richard Washburn Child...
...Basil Zaharoff...