strait-laced or straight-laced (strāt'lāst') adj.
- Excessively strict in behavior, morality, or opinions.
- Having or wearing a tightly laced garment.
[STRAIT, tightly (obsolete) + -laced (from LACE).]
straitlacedly strait'-lac'ed·ly (-lā'sĭd-lē, -lāst'lē) adv. straitlacedness strait'-lac'ed·ness n.
Wilkie Collins. By Peter Ackroyd. Chatto & Windus; 199 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
THIS may be Charles Dickens’s bicentenary, but Peter Ackroyd, having already written of that great author, has turned instead to his friend, Wilkie Collins, perhaps “the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists”. In this slim volume Mr Ackroyd skips along at a lively pace, tracing the arc of Collins’s life, from his happy childhood to his success as a novelist and playwright and his laudanum-laced decline.
Mr Ackroyd has made smooth work of threading together Collins’s life, but the missing information is revealing too. Collins never married; instead, he kept two mistresses in London. He resided with Caroline Graves and her daughter, Carrie, who became his amanuensis, while he housed Martha Rudd and their three children nearby. Their lives were intentionally obscured; in the 1871 census Caroline was listed as a widowed housekeeper and Martha referred to as Mrs Dawson.
North Korea’s soccer team qualified for the World Cup this year for the first time since 1966, when it reached the quarterfinals.
South Korea placed fourth in the 2002 World Cup, for which it and Japan were co-hosts.
lau·da·num
noun \ˈlȯd-nəm, ˈlȯ-də-nəm\Definition of LAUDANUM
See Origin of LAUDANUM
aman·u·en·sis
noun \ə-ˌman-yə-ˈwen(t)-səs\Definition of AMANUENSIS
Examples of AMANUENSIS
amanuensis, copies of most of the author's letters and unpublished manuscripts have been preserved>
Origin of AMANUENSIS
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