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Beau Brummell Beau Brummell – Красавчик Браммел; щёголь, денди, законодатель мод The model dandy in British society was George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840), in his early days, an undergraduate student at Oxford. Brummell was not from an aristocratic background; indeed, his greatness was based on nothing at all. Immaculately bathed and shaved, and dressed in a plain dark blue coat, he was always perfectly brushed and fitted. From the mid-1790s, Beau Brummell was the early incarnation of “the celebrity”, a man chiefly famous for being famous. By the time William Pitt (1708–1778), a British Whig statesman who led Britain during the Seven Years’ War, taxed hair powder in 1795 to help pay for the war against France, Brummell had already abandoned wearing a wig, and had his hair cut in the Roman fashion, “а la Brutus”. In 1799, upon coming of age, Beau Brummell inherited from his father a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, which he spent mostly on costume, gambling, and high living. In 1816 he suffered bankruptcy, the dandy’s stereotyped fate. He fled his creditors to France, where he lived the remainder of his life. He died penniless and insane from strokes in Caen in 1840. A statue of Brummell was erected on London’s Jermyn Street in 2002. Bed of Procrustes // Procrustean bed – (миф.) прокрустово ложе; мерка, под которую искусственно подгоняются искажаемые явления и факты; подгонка под произвольные стандарты In Greek mythology, Procrustes or “the stretcher” was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who physically attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. He had the bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith’s hammer, to 20