Word: 18th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Swordsman (Columbia) is set in 18th Century Scotland (which apparently never had a dour day) but still it's just another western. In fact, a few of the grizzled old clansmen lapse into an occasional drawl. Even Hero Larry Parks appears to be still playing in his most successful picture. The Jolson Story: at one point he declaims vibrantly: "Ah luhvs yuh!" But no oater-fan is likely to object to any of the escapes and chases and pounding hooves...
...Evidence. Step by step, the committee had weighed the evidence. First of all, Horn's transcript was suspiciously complete to have been copied from diaries he had described as "moth-eaten" and partly illegible. The papers used phrases unknown in the 18th Century ("frontire spirit," "race hatred"). Horn's ancestors showed themselves ignorant of the Julian calendar, which was universally used in their day. Horn's maps and court dockets bore a 19th Century watermark and were written with a metal pen and in blue-black ink, unknown until 1836. The documents had been "aged," said...
...Manhattan, the amateurish Draft-Eisenhower-for-President League granted its 17th and 18th state charters (to chapters in New York and Massachusetts). It also began passing out buttons ("I Like Ike") and got all tangled up in the political doubletalk of the week: "We want to keep away from any implication that he is a candidate. Though he hasn't said he won't be, he definitely has said he isn't." In New Haven, barnstorming Henry Wallace back-patted Ike as a "singularly enlightened man," predicted that he could win the presidency on either ticket, would...
London's 18th Century "bored and witless fashionables" delighted in the lectures of a quack named "Doctor" Graham. For his lecture on The Female, Graham used a half-clad model called the Goddess of Health (she was the beauty who became Lady Hamilton). For another, on Earth-Bathing, he sat naked in a pit of earth while explaining how much better it made his skin and blood feel. The big feature was the Celestial Bed, which would "rectify such physical impediments as impotence and sterility." To use it for a night, with unascertained results, a childless duke paid Graham...
Pritchett is most at home writing about the English tradition of picaresque heroes and prurient heroines. The 17th and 18th Centuries, he believes, produced literary techniques which later novelists have been wise to adopt. Smollett developed the physical realism and "chamberpot humor" which characterizes much of Joyce. Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many...