Array Коллектив авторов: 30 лучших рассказов британских писателей / 30 Best British Short Stories

aerolite– a stony meteorite

the Bristol Channel– an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean separating England from Wales

Pall Mall– a broad road in central London between Trafalgar Square and St. James Park

Madeira– a fortified wine, originally from the Portuguese island of Madeira

Venus– in Roman mythology, the goddess of love

Salamander– an amphibian, a small lizard-like animal; it was once supposed that salamanders could live in fire

Galileo Isaac Newton– the character of the story was christened after Galileo (1564–1642), a great Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), an English physicist and mathematician, one of the greatest figures of the scientific revolution of the 17th century

The Dancing Academy

Holborn-hill– Holborn is an area in central London west to the city

quadrille– a dance for four couples in square formation, popular in the 18th–19th centuries

minuet– an aristocratic couple dance of the 17th–18th centuries

gavotte– a lively kissing dance that came into fashion in England and France in the 17th–18th centuries

fandango– a Spanish courtship dance of Moorish origin, popular in Europe in the 17th century

farinagholkajingo– a dance and the corresponding word invented by the author

negus– a drink of hot sweetened wine, lemon juice, water, etc.

the Serpentine– a part of a large curved lake in Hyde Park used for boating in summer and skating in winter

Wessex– one of the historical Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of medieval England

symbolist– a representative of symbolism, a literary and artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; symbolists expressed their emotional experience through subtle symbolized language

decadent– a representative of decadence, a period of decline in literature and art at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries

Elizabethan fashion– fashion and style of the time of Elizabeth I (1533–1603), Queen of England

Bond Street– a street in central London famous for its expensive shops

The Grave by the Hand-post

Ivel, Casterbridge– fictional cities in Dorset invented by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

General Wellesley– Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington (1769–1852), the commander-in-chief of the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars and later prime minister of Great Britain

coroner– an official who is to inquire into any death that seems unnatural

felo de se– suicide

Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon– the Battle of Waterloo was the final defeat of Napoleon

reredos– in church, an ornamental screen covering the wall at the back of the altar

Braille– a writing system used for the blind and consisting of a code of 63 characters, invented in 1824 by Louis Braille (1809–1852), a French educator who was blind himself

Naples– a city in southern Italy, founded in 600 BC

Grantham– a town in Lincolnshire in east-central England, first mentioned in 1086

Stamford– a town on the River Welland in Lincolnshire in east-central England

Wesleyan– belonging to the family of the Wesleys

San Diego– a port and city on the Pacific coast in southern California

Newcastle– a city in the United States named for Newcastle upon Tyne in England

’ Frisco= San Francisco

La-De-Das– pretentious people

Kensington Gardens– a park in central London to the west of Hyde Park

Capetown– a city and seaport in South Africa

as dead as a door-nail– idiom absolutely dead

the Ascot– a horse race in Ascot, a most fashionable event that takes place annually in June

the Lincoln– an annual horse race in Lincolnshire

Hampshire– a historic county in south-central England, on the English Channel

Richmond Park– a park on the River Thames in central London

the Leger– Saint Leger, one of the three English Crown horse races; it is held annually in September in Doncaster, Yorkshire, since 1776

vicar– in the Church of England, the priest in charge of a parish

the Orkney (islands)– a group of more than 70 islands in northern Scotland

the Shetland Islands– a group of about 100 islands in the north of Scotland

Portsmouth– a city on Portsea Island in the historic county of Hampshire, a naval base and a resort

the Cockneys– here: native Londoners

the battle of Naseby– the battle between the Parliamentary Army under Oliver Cromwell and the royalists in June, 1645

Senlac– the place of the famous battle in which the English were defeated by the Normans under William the Conqueror in 1066

the Ganges– a great river in India, flowing from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, the holy river in Hinduism

Reginald on Christmas Presents

Tottenham Court Road– a street in central London

Durham– a historic county in northeastern England, on the North Sea coast

Omar Khayyám(1048–1131) – a great Persian poet, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher

FitzGerald’s notes– Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883), English poet and writer, famous for his translations of Omar Khayyám’s poetry and notes on it

crème de menthe– mint liqueur ( French )

Reginald’s Christmas Revel

Durbar– in India, an imperial assembly to mark some state occasion

Lapland– an area in northern Europe, in Norway, Sweden and Finland, mainly within the Arctic Circle; it was named for the Lapp, or Sami, who inhabited the region for many centuries

Tyrian scarlet– a natural dye of dark-red colour widely used in antiquity

Kipling– Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), an English writer, poet and novelist, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1907

Tuscany– a region in west-central Italy

Darwin– Charles Darwin (1809–1882), an English naturalist, the author of the theory of evolution by natural selection