Word: bleak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Williams recreates a dignified and genteel era. His copy of Block House is on the red velvet reading stand only for the sake of appearance, since Williams recites unfalteringly his adaptation of the bulky novel. Rearranging and shortening the stands of the initiate plot. Williams presents a version of Bleak House which the listener can follow with case and pleasure...
...Bleak House is Dickens' crusade against the British Court of Chancery which often dragged its lawsuits throughout several generations. Modeled on an actual twenty-year case, his suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is so old it has become "the death of many, but a joke in the legal profession." Caught in this slow judicial mill is a dewy orphan, Esther Summerson, and a bushelful of broadly caricatured eccentrics. Dickens loses his lightly ironic tone only when he drenches little Jo, the street sweeper, in compassion. Even here Williams is superb; he thunders the author's tearful commentary with a gusto...
...perhaps, another and reverse shift is due. Eisenhower has named to the job a stocky, straight-shouldered man with a strong nose, bleak blue eyes and a disarming smile. George Magoffin Humphrey, 62, is the 55th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. By all readable portents he will be the first in a generation to restore Treasury to its function of high policymaking-by fiscal leadership-not by bureaucratic control of business...
...most composers, growing old means growing mellower. But for England's Ralph Vaughan Williams, 80, the process is reversed. Last week the Halle Orchestra unveiled his seventh symphony, Sinfonia Antartica, and it proved as bleak as its title. Public and press, long accustomed to warmth in Vaughan Williams, went away with a case of chills...
Manhattan's galleries were off to a flying 1953 start with some 30 new shows open last week. Gallerygoers could choose to see almost anything from mild Bermuda landscapes to bleak views of the Arctic or carvings from the Congo. But the standout exhibition was home-town work: 119 paintings by two Greenwich Village women who rank among the top U.S. artists. Both are considered abstractionists, but the term covers a lot of ground and their paintings are as different as cumulus and calculus...