Word: conceit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...preacher to students, he constantly searches for "the judgment of history upon this place and this moment. We're very unlikely to uncover anything new. It's a conceit of our age that we are the first people who ever encountered anxiety or fear or guilt." When Gomes preached on one of the year's hottest campus issues, divestiture of university investments in firms active in South Africa, he did not dwell on the politics. Instead, he spoke of the irony that the dispute underscored: the crying need for firm moral convictions in a time when universities...
...other two shows also flatten Cheever's subtleties into middle-brow platitudes. In O Youth and Beauty!, Michael Murphy plays a onetime Princeton track star, now a bank executive, who vexes his wife (Kathryn Walker) by jumping over furniture at cocktail parties. Not content to let this conceit speak for it self, Playwright Gurney supplies dialogue to explain that the hero is "surmounting the obstacles of middle age . . . [by] leaping above the paraphernalia of middle-class life." In The Five-Forty-Eight, a dance of death between a married man (Laurence Luckinbill) and his jilted lover (Mary Beth Hurt...
...first meeting, Xuan Thuy greeted me and led me into the living room to meet the man whose conceit it was to use the title of Special Adviser to Xuan Thuy, although as a member of the governing Politburo he outranked him by several levels. Le Duc Tho's large luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of 16 to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. It was our misfortune that his cause should be to break our will and to establish Hanoi's rule over
...never forgot that Dobrynin was a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; I never indulged in the conceit that his easy manner reflected any predisposition toward me or toward the West. I had no doubt that if the interests of his country required it he could be as ruthless or duplicitous as any other Communist leader. But I considered his unquestioning support of the Soviet line an asset, not a liability: it enabled us to measure the policies of his masters with precision. Occasionally he would give me his personal analysis of American politics; without exception...
Fellini's crucial error is his movie's governing conceit. Rehearsal is built on a single, restrictive metaphor: the notion that a symphony orchestra can stand as a paradigm of society as a whole. Set entirely in a lovely 13th century oratory, the film ostensibly describes the rehearsal of an unnamed piece by the late film composer Nino Rota. But very quickly Fellini bends his dramatic situation into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy. The musicians begin by goofing off and refusing to play together; then they break into open, violent revolt against their German conductor...