Word: charm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Johns Hopkins' Kemp Malone, 67, brother of Biographer Dumas (Jefferson and His Time) Malone and himself a top authority on Old English literature. Because of his musical ear and his knowledge of phonetics, scholarly Kemp Malone could charm his classes by making the Canterbury Tales sound as if Chaucer himself were reading them. He could also terrify his students by storming at them over the slightest mistranslation. He continually failed to recognize even the brightest English majors, seldom entertained his colleagues, seemed to have an ingrained aversion to lunch at the faculty club. But for all his crotchets...
Hughes was warmly received until he started taking photographs and giving the tin containers for his tropic-pack film to the black children. Their parents snatched the shining tin away, fearing it was a whiteman's charm. An old man thumped Hughes's chest and cried: "You come to pay respects to Lenshina, all right. But don't come bring silver magic...
...gloomy gamblers of the Continent who frequent Monte Carlo's famed Casino are usually content to court fortune with no better equipment than a good-luck charm or an "infallible" system. Three Californians-Jason Lee, 60, Philip Aggie, 37, and Ralph Shaker, 40-were of a more practical stripe. Resolved to beat the American-type craps table at the old Casino, they arrived in Monaco, dropped $35,000 at the table, but returned to the U.S. with a handful of wax impressions of the Casino's dice. A month later, they went back armed for victory...
This book will be read devoutly by the thin cult of aging Americans for whom Henry Miller was the big name in a bohemian pantheon of goofy godlets. For others it has interest as the life record of a literary anarchist of boundless charm and talent but limited good sense, the loosest member of the Lost Generation, who, now 64. has lived these twelve years past as a sage emeritus in an arty enclave at Big Sur, Calif...
...could be sap-boiled down to a single sentence, it would read, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." In the days of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Time of Your Life and My Name Is Aram, Saroyan brought to this simple message an elfin charm, an infectiously wacky humor, and a flavor of childlike sweetness, as if his tales had been stolen from some happily hidden jam pot of life. But of late, the middle-aging (47) pixy of U.S. letters seems to have fallen into the writers' trap Kipling once spotted: "When...