Word: astonishment
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Fact: Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) was a Dutch painter with a sketchy biography and exacting pictures that continue to astonish more than three centuries after his death. Fiction: an illiterate girl named Greit, 17, a servant in the Vermeer household, was the model for the artist's celebrated portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring...
...LONESOME WEST Martin McDonagh continues to astonish. The young London playwright's comedy drama about two brothers fighting over their father's money--the third of a trilogy that includes last season's The Beauty Queen of Leenane--plays at first like a Two Stooges farce. But the laughs thinly disguise a chilling picture of human nature at its nastiest and a rebuke to the romance of rural Ireland...
...wouldn't have thought it, but in his 1998 documentary Cold War, Sir Jeremy Isaacs had it easy. In that show, he could impress the viewer with bombshells (real ones); in Millennium (CNN, Sundays through Dec. 12, 10 p.m. E.T.), he has to astonish us with what we already know. This 10-hour, chronological series doesn't always succeed, but at its best, its hyper welter of history renders the familiar surprising...
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest. MARK TWAIN...
...White House years Carter would astonish aides by proofreading their memos to him. Brinkley should have set Carter to work on the book manuscript, asking him to comb out the unaccountable sloppiness ("criteria" for "criterion," "bravado" for "bravura" and many other errors, including the "Pakistani billionaire" on page 224 who turns into a "Palestinian billionaire" on page 225) and moments of inadvisable rhetorical wing-flapping, as when Carter "embraced leprosy eradication...