Word: causticity
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...years as head of Hartford's Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., brilliant, caustic Frazar Bullard Wilde, 66, has boosted his company's premium income 1,000% (to $464 million a year), v. an insurance-industry average increase of 500%. Six years ago, invoking a state law that bars a life company from selling casualty insurance, New York State officials blocked Wilde's efforts to broaden Conn Gen's business still more by buying a casualty company. Defiantly, Wilde hired Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, and in a five-year legal battle won the right to control...
Come the noon hour, one course can be recommended without hesitation, the Schlesinger-less History 169, manned by Professor Donald Fleming, whose elegant caustic and welcomely epigrammatic lectures on the History of American intellectual thought (1789 to present) are delectable. The reading list is long and magnificent...
...Death of Tragedy, by George Steiner. Well equipped with caustic wit as well as learning, the author ably follows his subject from Aeschylus to Brecht...
Georges Bizet was just 24 when he wrote his first full-scale opera. He soon wished that he hadn't. The Pearl Fishers, wrote one caustic Parisian critic, had "neither fishermen in the libretto nor pearls in the music." Bizet, who died at only 36, went on to greater glory with Carmen, but Pearl Fishers has never had more than indifferent success outside France and Italy. Last week, at the opening of the Empire State Music Festival, it got a rare, full-dress U.S. performance. The performance suggested that Bizet's fishermen have been receiving less than their...
Steam heat is, in fact, the ideal climate for Mauldin's style of searing creativity. In an art that often uses a shovel instead of a rapier, a backslap instead of a boot, Mauldin, 39, wields the hottest editorial brush in the U.S. Full of caustic and rebellious passions, he boils over onto his drawing board with the scalding effect of a well-aimed spit of lava. "You've got to be a misanthrope in this business," says Mauldin. "A real son of a bitch. I'm touchy. I've got raw nerve ends...