Word: clever
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this medieval rhetoric gives the book a very clever structure. Louise Agar has spent her 26 failure-ridden years believing in the distant past. But now the "Lord and Lover" has become her employer Giles, instead of Christ. The Treatise fascinates Giles, too--not its ideas, but its language. After losing his sight and his first two wives. Giles hires Louise as a research assistant. His sorrows, his grouchy promiscuity, and his insecurities as a scholar leave him totally unprepared for her chaste, almost religious adoration. Unless he can deal with his miserable past, his budding love affair is doomed...
...this is very clever indeed, but goes nowhere toward making us feel what Giles felt. We are not able to picture the young Giles' cynicism at Cambridge from the narrator's sarcasm. Giles himself does not seem to have learned anything from his experience either. We long for anecdote, gasping with renewed interest when a crumb of plot is revealed. Wilson may have done this intentionally is make us feel how petty Giles Fox's life is. If so, the idea fails, because the result is overblown in its melodrama and moreover-tedious to read...
...clever characters in the book do not seem to balance with Giles' weighty gloom. It is hard to see the world, so to speak, through a blind man's eyes, and hard to make funny stories with happy endings out of morose ideas. Wise Virgin's cleverness just cannot buoy up its hero's dead weight...
...fairies cavorts about the stage, the audience is immersed in a world of magic, created not only by the intricacies of the typically complicated G&S plot but also by the exuberance of the chorus' movements as their characters clumsily try to dance together. Strong voices are complemented by clever staging, as the brightly colored fairies set the hypnotic tone for the rest of the production...
...president of this University, who believe that. And may I also suggest that probably only a white male can make the statement that was just made with such confidence. I think that there's a definite inconsistency in what you say, but first of all you're making a clever move in trying to reduce the demand for diversity in the faculty to one based solely on the candidate's race, dismissing the importance of what makes race important in this question. I think what makes race important is that a certain race of people have been excluded from...