Word: brilliantly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...performing modern music, the kind he likes best. The orchestra members, working too hard and denied a hand in policymaking, felt like underpaid hired help. And Manager Judson could not escape his share of the blame. Throughout his remarkable career, Judson had treated music as a business, usually with brilliant results, but his artist-clients came to fear his power...
Novelist Howe's book is most satisfying when it careens through the sacred precincts of Holy Old Boston. She does a brilliant autopsy on Maggie's Bradfield in-laws, with their clapboard Essex County cottages named after characters in Gilbert and Sullivan and their stupefying Sunday evenings of jolly songs, recitations and parlor games. As her first husband explains: "The whole point of a family party is that you don't have to talk. It would ruin it if you had to be thinking of things to say." But once Maggie is launched into the world beyond...
...whole, Biographer Ervine has written a solid, slow, yet readable account. It is duller, but more complete, than Hesketh Pearson's brilliant portrait (1950). And it firmly supports Shaw's claim to being the greatest dramatist in the English language since Shakespeare-a claim recently supported by his erratic fellow Irishman, Sean O'Casey. Wrote O'Casey in a memorable tribute: "Look at the Theatre as it was . . . So sob-sisterly, so stupid, so down to dust was the Theatre then that God turned his back to it, made for Shaw, caught him by the beard...
Cruel Nouns. Introducing this first English translation of one of Herzen's most famous works, From the Other Shore, a brilliant journalistic-philosophical assessment of Europe after the 1848 revolutions, Riga-born Oxford Don Isaiah Berlin has underlined Herzen's teaching with some wry modern hindsight. As an observer of 19th century Europe, "only Marx and Tocqueville are comparable to him," says Berlin. "For Herzen," he says, the " 'collective nouns' capable of stirring strong emotion, like Nationality, or Democracy, or Equality, or Humanity, or Progress . . . [were] modern versions of ancient religions which demanded human sacrifice...
...other words, Herzen knew the Animal Farm that Russia was to become. The astonishing thing is that this half-forgotten philosopher was as modern as an existentialist, and warned against "modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus" i.e., every man his own pope. Herzen's message, supported by brilliant observation of a Europe which was grandfather to today's discontents, is the simple one that no man is fit to be the master of another, whether his rule is imposed in the name of privilege or brotherhood. Today Herzen makes clear what the world lost when Russia turned...