Word: buffooning
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Frost did a tough job on Nixon. The prevailing rumor had been that Frost got the nod because of his American reputation for skillfully playing the buffoon to celebrities and near-celebrities on talk show programs. But this was the Frost of the old BBC "That Was the Week That Was," and obviously he had done a lot of homework and he did his best to nail Nixon. But he didn't have to. Nixon nailed himself...
...events that come close enough to scorch the Roman populace: treaties made and broken, victories, slaughters, final solutions, barbarities parading as statecraft. This constant juxtaposition of power and the powerless begins as an easy irony but slowly swells toward a cosmic pathos. While Mussolini strutted like a deranged buffoon, "Rome took on the appearance of certain Indian metropolises where only the vultures get enough to eat and there is no census of the living and the dead...
...nevertheless succeeds as the crabby, meddling Egeus. All five of the Athenian workmen-turned-actors give good performances, but David Anderson as the bellowing, overeager Bottom deserves special notice. It is easy to play this role as pure slapstick. Anderson goes beyond mere egotism and develops Bottom as a buffoon--grabby and self-centered, but well-meaning, without snobbery and pretensions. We get the feeling that if Bottom was accused of his faults, he would stand befuddled, wondering, Me? You can't mean Me? He is a consummate...
...stunning upset, Mrs. Gandhi lost her own carefully nurtured constituency in Uttar Pradesh by 55,000 votes to Raj Narain, a socialist buffoon whom she had trounced by 112,000 votes in 1971. "India is Indira, and Indira is India," Congress Party President D.K. Barooah used to boast. He will say it no more. Defeated in an adjoining constituency by 76,000 votes was Sanjay, in his first try for elective office. Of 542 seats in the new Lok Sabha (Lower House), Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party won only 153 (v. 355 in the last Parliament), while Desai...
Died. John Dickson Carr, 70, dapper, scholarly author of more than 100 mystery novels; of cancer; in Greenville, S.C. Under his own name and two pseudonyms (Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson), he created two super sleuths: an Oxford don named Gideon Fell and an engaging buffoon, Sir Henry Merrivale. Carr's specialties were historical mysteries and locked-room murders, involving a corpse found alone in a room sealed from the inside. Though his subject matter was grisly, Carr maintained that "morbidity has nothing to do with it, any more than with solving chess or mathematics problems...