![]() It went back to the eighteenth century and was a more interesting thing than its picturesque aspects suggest, just as the bullfight is more than the costumes of the toreros and the ceremonial parade. One of the things that had least changed in Granada was the manner of courting. And who were t he young men one saw when darkness fell, pressed like moths against the bars of the ground-floor windows? They were the novios discoursing on love and marriage to their novias within. This was the sober, all-the-year-round costume of the country people, which contrasted with the melodramatic cloaks faced with scarlet silk which the men of the middle classes wore during the winter months. From morning to night the Plaza Bibarrambla, which is today so dead, was filled with peasants in black corduroy suits and black and purple dresses and head handkerchiefs. Children still played their round games in the squares, water sellers hawked their water from the Fuente del Avellano, the goats climbed the staircases to be milked, the pastelerías had not yet learned to make French pastries, the ice-cream makers continued to fetch their snow on muleback from the summits of the sierra just as they had been doing since Arab times. Yet though Granada had all the outward aspect of an up-to-date city, it continued to belong spiritually and by force of inertia to the past. Of the same age was the electric light, which of all the inventions of the nineteenth century was perhaps the only one to be really welcomed by the Spaniards, because it enabled them to do something they had always longed to do - turn night into day. The electric tram was in its first glory, sailing like a swan along the streets with far less creaking and shrieking than it makes today. The twenties were a period of economic prosperity following on a decade or two of civic improvement and renovation. Then two names stand out, the composer Manuel de Falla and the poet Federico García Lorca. Later the nineteenth century gave it a political thinker in Angel Ganivet, but one cannot speak of great figures or of a society mature enough to nourish a vigorous art before the 1920s. The Golden Age of Spanish culture therefore passed without Granada’s being able to claim any painter or sculptor of importance, except Alonso Cano, or any writers other than the aristocrat Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the preacher Luis de Granada. Till 1571 it was a Moorish town, not altogether unlike Tetuan today, and after that it was eclipsed by Seville, to which the trade with the Indies had drawn all the life and wealth in the country outside Madrid. Yet in fact this has never, except for a short spell before the Civil War, been the case. Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule.GRANADA, with its cypresses and its poplar trees, its running water and its airy situation, seems designed like Florence to be a city where the arts of poetry and painting and music take root and flourish. Will Pepper, a vivacious Texan, survive a Senate confirmation battle? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill a Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won't have the nerve to reject her-Judge Pepper Cartwright, star of the nation's most popular reality show. President Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees onto the Supreme Court. In bestselling author Christopher Buckley's hilarious novel, the President of the United States, ticked off at the Senate for rejecting his nominees, decides to get even by nominating America's most popular TV judge to the Supreme Court.
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