busman's holiday

“In a way, we’re living Halloween every day, so painting my daughter’s face was really a bit of a busman’s holiday,” Barrie Gower says with a laugh.

O’Connor plucked this Prince song from an album by his busman’s holiday the Family — the Purple One didn’t even design to release it on his own — and turned it into an uncommonly somber torch song.

He was otherwise so absorbed in work — he was looking over early proofs of a Cynthia Ozick book while counting contractions for his pregnant wife — that the author Thomas Mallon summed up his life as a “busman’s holiday without any brakes.”

And yet, these charming pieces represent not work for hire so much as a kind of busman’s holiday, in which the author could let down his guard.

Sequestered with his family for 18 months in their 1955 cabin in Esopus, New York, he embarked on a long busman’s holiday.