All 6 Uses of
preside
in
A Sketch of the Past
- Theyare "presided over" by some of the six lovely sisters; who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies; they sit enthroned, and talk with foreign emphatic gestures —my mother too gesticulated, throwing her hands out—to the eminent men (afterwards to be made fun of by Lytton); rulers of India, statesmen, poets, painters.†
- He must have been an attractiveman at fifty; a man who had four small children, and a beautiful wife; a man who came into the drawing room in evening dress and marched off down to dinner with Mrs Gosse, or Lady Romer, or Mrs Booth, or Lady Lyttleton, just as he presided over London Library meetings and went to the Ad Eundem dinner at Oxford or at Cambridge.†
- Round the walls hung Sir Joshua engravings; in the corner on a pedestal of mottled yellow marble stood the bust of the first Sir James—an eyeless, white man who still presides in the hall of Adrian's house in Regents Park.†
*
- From the three long windows one looked out over the roofs of Kensington, to the presiding Church of St Mary Abbots, the church where our conventional marriages were celebrated—and one day standing there father saw an eagle.†
- In the evening back they would all come; Adrian from Westminster; Jack from Lincoln's Inn Fields; Gerald from Dents; George from the Post office or the Treasury, back to the focus, the tea table, where Nessa and I presided.†
- And over that turbulent whirlpool the ghosts of mother and Stella presided.†
Definition:
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(preside) to be in charge; or to head; or to be the chairperson -- especially of a formal meeting or ceremony