Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...brilliant bundle of contradictions, Aaron Burr had not been able to get along with General Washington at his New York headquarters. Yet as commander of the Revolutionary forces in Orange County he had distinguished himself for soldierly competence. After the Revolution he had practiced law in New York, become embroiled in a dubious land deal, survived it to go to the U. S. Senate and receive as many votes as Thomas Jefferson for President, only to be kicked downstairs into the Vice-Presidency by vote of the House of Representatives. Cast out by both parties for killing Alexander Hamilton...
Historian. As a young man Mark Sullivan was vastly impressed by the late Harry Thurston Peck's brilliant history of the contemporary U. S., Twenty Years of the Republic (1885-1905). Years later after seeing many a U. S. political event from the inside, Journalist Sullivan began to read accounts of some of them and say to himself, "That was not the way it happened." History, he concluded, can never be rightly written from documents alone. Too much happens behind the scenes, too much is decided by a passing word or nod of the head, too many varying accounts...
...easy to be jocose in dealing with our ancestors. But the biographer who is persistently jocose is more likely to cheapen himself than entertain his readers. "Count Rumford of Massachusetts" is the life of a brilliant and eccentric cosmopolitan figure in eighteenth century politics, science, and society. Yet Mr. Thompson seems far more bent in his book on playfully pointing out the quaint ways of our forebears in that remote age than on giving us a true picture of his subject. Perhaps no one else who has ever really read a book printed before 1800 has been amused...
After When Johnny Comes Marching Home last week, Critic Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune said: "[Harris'] is a brilliant, vivid, able and engrossing essay in the variation form. . . ." Said seasoned old William J. Henderson of the New York Sun: "One should not take such a composition too solemnly...
...this period he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, which Louis XVI promptly suppressed. A brilliant comedy, relating the conflict of a lackey and his noble master, its revolutionary implications were plain, for it presented the lackey as witty, resourceful, strong. For the first time, a member of the lower class was pictured as a hero on the formal Paris stage. Inconsistently, the bored nobles demanded the presentation of a play which ridiculed them and delighted the masses, forced Louis to withdraw...