Word: afflatus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just right-involved yet detached, never querulous but capable of showing marked distaste, even derision, for some of the bad actors in the great drama of this century. He is never grandiloquent, and for this reason the reader is likely to trust him more than Winston Churchill, whose rhetorical afflatus invites suspicion that the great man perhaps tended to force history into his own dramatic cast of mind. It was, however, as Churchill's man, his emissary (his "dogsbody" as the English say, or his gillie, as a Scottish laird might say) that Macmillan played a large, though unobtrusive...
...spirit capable of this sort of afflatus has trouble in this world. His most characteristic letter is the one that most eloquently set forth the bitter awareness that his great gifts needed as great a discipline to create the form in which they might be expressed. He was only 24 when he wrote, promising to send a copy of his book of poems. Permit Me Voyage: "I am in most possible kinds of pain . . . and the trouble revolves chiefly round the simple-sounding problem of how to become what I wish I could when I can't. That, however...