Word: brilliants
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...most ambitiously, and successfully, in The Golden Notebook, her 12th novel, published in 1962. A formal tour de force, The Golden Notebook is the story of a divorced writer named Anna Wulf told through her four notebooks, each of which is concerned with recording a different aspect of herself. Brilliant, autobiographical and feverishly experimental, it's a bravura portrait of a shattered self, richly adorned with ruthless commentary on psychoanalysis, Communism, England and Africa, and modern fiction. "This novel," Lessing has said of The Golden Notebook, "is an attempt to break a form; to break certain forms of consciousness...
Within that exclusive group of literary characters who have survived through the centuries - from Hercules to Hamlet to Huckleberry Finn - few can rival the cultural impact or staying power of that brilliant sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Since his debut 120 years ago, the gaunt gentleman with the curved pipe and a taste for cocaine, the master of deductive reasoning and elaborate disguise, has left his mark everywhere - in crime literature, film and television, cartoons and comic books. Even his home on Baker Street has for decades been one of London's most popular tourist destinations: the Sherlock Holmes Museum...
...ordinary citizen visiting the court on an oral-argument day is likely to feel as though she has wandered into a Vatican conference room filled with adepts in Augustinian theology debating arcane questions in hurried Latin. The Justices are scarlet-capped cardinals; the law clerks are the brilliant new seminary graduates, their razor minds undulled by actual experience; the lawyers at the dais are the theologians commissioned to assist in plumbing the sacred texts...
...seemed the essence of a historic political migration: white males fleeing the feminized, antiwar, politically correct Democratic Party. He was your basic Reagan Democrat, fully loaded with a resonant, iron-edged voice and the ability to write razor lyrics that stuck in the mind and the craw. His brilliant anthem-Okie from Muskogee-became a rallying cry for those who were disgusted by the "hippies out in San Francisco" smoking marijuana and burning draft cards. His next patriotic volley had this chorus: "When they're runnin' down my country, man, you're walkin' on the fightin' side...
...pick up an older man in full view of his most-wanted poster. As the national media grows obsessed with the manhunt, Reyes begins phoning a tabloid reporter following his story, desperately trying to take control of his own image. "I'm a sympathetic subject," he tells her. "Brilliant. Good-looking. So you let me tell you how it's going down." The tabloid reporter ends the show with a monologue about writing a bestseller entitled Most Wanted which she describes as "Sordid, juicy, sad and oh so entertaining...