Word: armchair
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like other people who are humiliated and threatened, we talk now mostly about retribution. Washington echoes the brave calls of armchair generals from the provinces who would devastate the Bekaa Valley or demolish the Beirut airport or launch a search-and-destroy mission in the city. Retaliation may have its place when, in that rare instance, terrorists separate themselves from the fabric of innocent society. The better answer lies in every American's awareness and understanding that terrorism must be met on its own terms...
...works at 400 million copies. Given such glittering evidence and the clues provided by her fiction, a mystique was bound to develop around the one whodunit: Agatha the enchantress, the proper Englishwoman with a power to murder and create. When she insisted that the truth was far less exotic, armchair sleuths who had been trained by her books recognized a false lead when they...
...wanted to hear, isn't it? Usually, I just demur. People would like to know exactly how rich I am, but it's none of their goddam business." Of course not, but it is safe to guess that he is probably rich enough to buy Louis XIV's favorite armchair--and everything else in the palace of Versailles. But who would want such froufrou when he could have a genuine Harrison Ford bedside table? "It looks like a bedside table, and that's why I like it," says Ford, sounding like a boy in the first stage of puppy love...
...conceived by Beckett, Endgame is a verbal battle between men on the verge of extinction. His stage directions call for a bare interior, grey light, and two small windows. The only furniture is an armchair and two garbage cans. In the armchair sits the blind Hamm who spends all his time lording over his adopted son Clov, who proves mysteriously, incapable of disobedience to Hamm's tyrannical dictates. Hamm's ancient and dying parents, Nag and Nell, dwell in the garbage cans...
Most of his furniture, designed during the Depression, was intended for particular buildings. A chair made for the Finnish civil guard headquarters is blunt and homely, but utility was the point: half a dozen or more could be stacked up for storage. A stacking armchair designed in 1929, its rear legs, back rail and arms a single piece of bent wood, is swanker, a kind of streamlined Thonet. Yet despite the curvature, it is still a plain old chair, a clunky seat stuck onto four legs-a goat just beginning, it appears, to turn into a gazelle...