Word: contrivedness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marco Millions, by Eugene O'Neill, seemed a ponderous, pontifical play when it was first produced in 1928, and it has not improved with age. O'Neill's idea was to cast Marco Polo as the go-getting, money-grubbing Babbitt from Polo Bros., Venice, whose travels...
Governor of Martinique, and soon decamped with him for France. There, to strengthen her position, she contrived a marriage between Beauharnais's son Alexander and her niece, Josephine, just turned 16. When Alexander met his bride on her arrival at Brest, he wrote cautiously to his father: "Mademoiselle will...
Sherry is the drink Pamela Frankau is offering here for those who take it-out of a cut-glass decanter, and perhaps a biscuit to go with it. The time is 1926, when England was just recovering from the general strike. Back from assorted boarding schools, the three Weston children...
Though his book is wildly comic, Simckes also means to be profound. Gleich's humanizing influence on the son, Barish, is subtle and significant, awakening in the previously uncommitted and detached narrator pity--even for the most twisted form of life. Simckes also suggests the crucial necessity of ritual and...
Opium of the Muses. Writing the first full-length biography of Apollinaire by an American, Francophile Francis Steegmuller has considerable trouble trying to find the real man in the middle. His carefully contrived book is likely to please best only those readers who know least about Apollinaire, but who are...