Word: aristocrat
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Many were mourning not only an exceptional figure but an era and a society that was able to produce exceptional figures. Except possibly for De Gaulle, who was of Churchill's own generation, today's rulers seem, in comparison, faceless and mediocre. Churchill was an aristocrat, a brilliant dilettante, a creator in a dozen roles and garbs. He was a specialist in nothing-except courage, imagination, intelligence. He was never afraid to lead, and he knew that a leader must sometimes risk failure and disapproval rather than seek universal acclaim. He had been, as Denis Brogan...
...performance of flinty authority, Sydney Walker plays the old Prince Bolkonski, an aristocrat who tyrannizes his nearest and dearest and who paradoxically loves and is loved by them. His dying words to his daughter, "Put on your white dress. I always liked it," have the poignant impact of mortality that only the greatest writers achieve with the simplest of sentiments. His son, Prince Andrei (Donald Moffat), has the ache of desolation in his face, a man who goes off to war because death has already claimed his heart. As Andrei's love-tossed, love-lost Natasha, Rosemary Harris...
...first example of computer fiction, it is a triumphant imitation. The characters are as inevitable as those in great myths or TV wrestling matches. Villain Henry Warren is a pallidly ambitious Flem Snopes type who manages a mammoth truck-farming plantation. His wife Julie-Ann is a neurotic Southern aristocrat. They have (what else?) an idiot child. Hero Reeve Scott is a young Negro just returned from the Army, determined to fight for his rights and not let Henry Warren steal his patch of land away from him. Reeve's mother is (what else?) the heroic matriarch who long...
This ending is untrue to death. It would have been more moving, as well as more accurate, to have the aristocrat leave and the doctor face his fate. Furthermore, the episode subverts the play's moral stance. It is morally impermissible for the doctor to accept his life at the cost of the prince's. Even so, the stagecraft is considerably less faulty than the logic. Miller has written an equation with a missing term-power. Power precedes responsibility. One is not accountable for events that one is powerless to avert or affect...
When he was asked what he did during the Terror of the French Revolution, the aristocrat Emmanuel Sieyes replied, "I survived." If Soviet NoveMst llya Ehrenburg were asked about his own activities during the 20-year Stalinist terror, he might well give the same answer. Considering that just about every eminent Russian writer and artist was exiled, executed or hounded to suicide by the paranoid dictator, Ehren-burg's survival is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of modern times...