Word: authorization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...arrest of leading Jewish intellectuals. A purge of the arts was under way that mortally threatened those writers and composers who had survived the Great Terror of the mid-'30s. In music the principal target was Shostakovich. Though laden with Stalin Prizes, he was now being termed the author of "un-Soviet, unwholesome, eccentric, tuneless" works. He knew what to do. In 1936 he had nearly lost his life after receiving a public "whipping" for an opera that had displeased Stalin. Following a Central Committee resolution condemning him in 1948, he publicly expressed "deep gratitude" to the Communist Party...
...seeming to uphold American political traditions, Podhoretz and his allies have been dubbed "neo-conservatives," a label that causes them some discomfort. Podhoretz continues to claim to be a liberal; it is the radicals, he insists, who became illiberal. Such quib bling may be of greater interest to the author than to his readers. But if his book is often tedious in detail, it has a sweeping theme. At a time of testing, the Commentary group upheld standards of civilized discourse and thereby earned an honorable place in the history of American letters. They behaved as intellectuals are supposed...
Perelman's cosmopolitan imagination had a definite surreal twist to it. In "low dudgeon," he viewed the world's quirky moving parts as threats to his safety, sanity and solvency. Acres and Pains was a 1947 collection of mock-Thoreauvian japes inspired by the author's four dec ades of semirustication on 100 stony acres in Bucks County, Pa. His definition of a gentleman's farm: "An irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city...
Though he was born in Brooklyn, the city of Perelman's childhood and youth was Providence. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. At Brown University one of his best friends was Nathanael West, the future author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and a future brother...
James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizons, modeled his apocryphal land of "Shangri-la" after Tibet. Heinrich Harrer, a European mountaineer who served as tutor to the Dalai Lama during the 40s, wrote in wonder of a land where one quarter of the adult population were monks or nuns. In his travels through Tibet. Harrer noted that there were no public inns. Tibetans opened their homes to all travelers, he wrote, as if grateful for the opportunity to serve. Harrer encountered niches of subtropical vegetation growing amidst snow-covered montains, monasteries built upon seemingly inaccessible cliffs, and mediums...