Word: causticity
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...writer trying to secure canonization for his friend, a deceased Pope. In his 26th novel and most bizarre work since A Clockwork Orange (1962), the author raises the stakes in his gamble for freshness. The End of the World News offers a trio of plots linked by irony and caustic satire...
...refused to endorse either the Reagan plan or an effort by King Hussein of Jordan to join future negotiations. Though many Palestinian moderates were encouraged by Arafat's strength at the meeting and by his ability to keep the organization united, the result was murky. Snapped an uncharacteristically caustic U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz: "We are constantly following the will-o'-the-wisp of what Arafat thinks lately. It is always very, very difficult to pin down...
...marble fireplace mantelpiece is shrouded, and the living room floor is scattered with empty packing cartons. In the direst exodus of their lives, Fanny (Marian Seldes) and Gardner Church (Donald Moffat) are retreating, year-round, to their summer cottage on Cape Cod. There, as Fanny puts it, with caustic self-pity, there will be "nothing but the gulls, the oysters...
...backstage wisdom popular among targets of caustic review holds that every drama critic is a frustrated actor or director. By that measure, Rob ert Brustein may be the most serene critic in America. For nearly two decades, the longtime scholar and sometime reviewer for the New Republic and the New York Times has been able to cast himself occasionally as an actor, hire himself as a director, and indulge his critical precepts as producer of two celebrated and controversial theater companies...
Quartermaine's Terms calls for a more self-effacing style of acting, though the results are scarcely less virtuosic. Unlike Simon Gray's two major U.S. successes, Butley and Otherwise Engaged, this semicomic, semipoignant drama, set in a bleary backwater of academe, does not focus on a caustic wit who tosses poisoned darts at the world around him. Quartermaine's Terms is Gray's gentlest and most compassionate play. No stiff upper lips need apply. The drama's hero, or non-hero, might be called "Mr. Cellophane," after a song in the musical Chicago. People...