Word: childhoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life of a militant Communist leader-in & out of jail, in & out of Russia. He developed into one of the party's most effective orators. Most of all, from his childhood on, Thorez read everything he could lay his hamlike hands on. Today he can gallop through a technical book, or one on philosophy or art, and then give without a stumble a half-hour precis of its contents. In lectures and debates at the Sorbonne, in meetings of legal and philosophical societies, he shines-a grinning, grown-up Quiz-kid with a cowlick over his forehead...
...what they knew. When Mark found that Corinne, who had always spent his money like water, had paid off all their debts during the war, his suspicions grew darker. He raked up a hundred and one details of Corinne's past which now suddenly seemed sinister-her peculiar childhood memories, the time she had insisted on signing her maiden name to an important bill-and then hysterically refused to admit that she had done it. And what had her psychiatrist meant when he talked, in his mysterious jargon, about Corinne's "association with a type of love which...
Copperfield at 40. "Success," observed Nathaniel Hawthorne, from his vantage point as American consul in Liverpool, "makes an Englishman intolerable, [but] an Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character." When successful Charles Dickens looked back on the adversities of his childhood, he found them too painful to disclose even to his wife: not until he was almost 40 could he bear to relive them, and to cast them from him into David Copperfield. Father John Dickens, the original of Micawber-"a jovial opportunist . . . who borrowed from anyone foolish enough to make him cash advances"-took twelve-year-old Charles...
...Maria Beadnell, a City bank manager's cold, flirtatious daughter, who aroused "whatever of fancy, romance, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me." When, after some two years' courtship, he realized that Maria was making a fool of him, Dickens buried her away as deeply as his childhood miseries...
...last, long-drawn-out day of Frankie's childhood is highlighted not by a picture show, but by one of the few dramatic incidents in the novel-Frankie's narrow escape from a drunken soldier. The rest of The Member of the Wedding is devoted to an uncertain child's private meanderings through a stewing hot summer day, when the old ways and excitements have ceased to have meaning, and the most familiar streets and houses have lost their familiar look; when the ear catches nothing but sounds that are incomplete, and the eye is deceived...