Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...latest work, this fatal thread becomes the whole cloth, as Tuchman explores the nature of governmental folly and dissects some choice examples: the Renaissance papacy, 18th century England, the 20th century U.S. Folly, as Tuchman defines it, is not simply incompetence or tyranny or hubris, but rather "the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest." She requires that the policy was perceived as folly in its own time, that a sensible alternative was available, and that the policy nonetheless was carried out by a group over more than one political lifetime. She makes one exception to that last criterion...
Brinkmann, a specialist in 19th and 20th century music history, cited the atmosphere at Harvard and the prominence of the professors in the department as the two main reasons for his decision to leave Germany...
...author Scott Elledge reports a remark about White which the poet Adrienne Rich made in a letter to Katharine Angell. White's late wife. Rich said "she thought, without detracting an inch from H.D.T., that it must be a good deal more difficult to be E.B. White in the 20th century than Henry Thoreau in the 19th ... How's this? Is White a troubled or oppressed American? Famous as a stylist, essayist, and author of children's books. White has long been identified with the The New Yorker. America's most prestigious and profitable magazine, for which he has worked...
That Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most prodigally gifted artist of the 20th century can hardly be in doubt, even among those who can make the effort to see him with a measure of skepticism or detachment. But his last years have always posed a problem. When the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was filled with Picasso's last paintings in the summer of 1973, they caused as much disappointment as surprise. Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse. The walls were covered with 17th century dwarfs and musketeers, puffing...
...quirks of 20th century music is that Italian opera should have gone into such decline. Italy, after all, gave birth to bel canto, and is the homeland of Rossini, Bellini and Verdi. Yet the effervescent melodic line that began with Monteverdi during the Renaissance exhausted itself with the death of Giacomo Puccini in 1924, and has been only fitfully revived by such contemporary figures as the late Luigi Dallapiccola. There is, it seems, a lost generation of Italian opera composers. But what happened to them...