Word: conceited
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...institute is so little known and so anachronistic -- a club, chapel and classroom complex for merchant mariners -- that it seems like a novelistic conceit. Its fey charms evidently inspired James Stewart Polshek as he designed its new quarters. Instead of creating a boringly deferential pseudo- 18th century building, he has both respected tradition and done something entirely original. From a new, neighborly four-story red brick base, Polshek has popped two prow-shaped floors clad in a modernist grid of white enameled metal. Such a building could be tricky and meretricious, but Polshek, one of the finest uncelebrated architects working...
...country is, among other things, an idea, often dressed up as an ism. The U.S.S.R., a hodgepodge of would-be nation states, was based on an outmoded idea, imperialism, and a modern one, totalitarianism. There was in the minds of those old men in the Kremlin the conceit, personified and perfected by Stalin, that fear makes the world go round; fear can make the worker work, the % farmer farm, the writer write and, of course, the Latvian, the Armenian, the Uzbek and the Ukrainian all take orders from Moscow...
Welcome to '90s revisionism run riot. And, assuming such a well-loved tale actually needs to be made more relevant for today's audience, a not unpromising conceit. Robin Williams is a Peter Unprincipled, grounded in all the latest guilts and anxieties. He has a new surname (Banning) and a wife and two kids he neglects, owing to the press of the greed business. He is also afflicted by a convenient case of amnesia. He knows he's an orphan, but he can't remember anything that happened before "Gran Wendy" (Maggie Smith) arranged for his adoption by an American...
...knotting the rope, throwing it over the limb of a tree. The others allow themselves to be carried passively by the group purpose. Lynch mobs always armor themselves with a sense of their retributive righteousness. They also mean to exert social control by exemplary doses of terror, on the conceit that violence is the only language the victim understands...
...trademark mannerisms are in evidence, from the nasal drawl of contempt to the wounded-crow flutter of arms and hands. So is the open-wound vulnerability that brings her fey lunacy back to earth. She takes a character who is mostly an idea, a conceit -- a person for whom pretending is more real than reality -- and invests her with poignancy and pride. In spirit Lettice is a one-woman show. But Smith gets splendid support from Margaret Tyzack in the thankless, stereotypical role of her clumping comrade Lotte Schoen and obliquely from Britain's Prince Charles, whose marginally less dotty...