Word: brashness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This was the period of Kern's "Princess Theater musicals," written with Wodehouse (pre-Jeeves) and Bolton. At a time when Continental operettas were all the rage, these "midget musical comedies" -- airy, brash and daringly American -- created a theatrical revolution to a ragtime beat. They set the tone and tempo on Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy...
...fences reading ARMED GUARD ON DUTY AT ALL TIMES, as regular as the forays to Jamail's grocery store with the cook and chauffeur to carry home the dips and sauces and racks of lamb. Clothes are an essential part of the endless series of balls by which this brash, arriviste city supports its cultural and charitable urges...
Adler has made a point of pondering and whacking at the errors of his chosen victims in modern philosophy for more than 50 years. As a brash undergraduate at Columbia, he once confronted the august philosopher John Dewey so sharply on a theological issue that the great man stormed from the room growling, "Nobody is going to tell me how to love God." In Ten Philosophical Mistakes Adler makes only an occasional swipe at Dewey and leaves God pretty much alone. But he takes on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and a passel of other post-16th century thinkers, whose...
Almost any literary contrivance can be called a novel nowadays, so the label will do for Flaubert's Parrot. What the book turns out to be, though, is a brash, footloose ramble through the life and works of Gustave Flaubert, and it is hard to think of a work starting from such a narrow, scholarly premise that is so free of preciousness. Julian Barnes does provide one conventional feature: a narrator, in this case Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor and Flaubert amateur. He first visited Normandy, the novelist's native ground, as a soldier in 1944, and after...
...network fraternity. CBS, with its distinguished legacy of William Paley, Edward R. Murrow and Playhouse 90, has always embodied broadcasting's old- school elite. NBC, originator of the Today and Tonight shows and numerous other firsts, is a respected, if sometimes stodgy, TV pioneer. ABC, by contrast, is the brash outsider, by turns more innovative and more shrewdly commercial than either of its rivals...