Word: curiousities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Raging River. Although Nehru's feelings about China were undoubtedly strong, they were couched in his own curious brand of spongy language ("An attempt to explain the situation by the use of rather worn-out words, phrases and slogans is seldom helpful"). If he hoped thereby that Peking would as softly reply, he misjudged his antagonist. Peking began a hue and cry about how "intolerable" Nehru's remarks were, and set in motion the whole dreary ritual of thousands of agitation meetings to condemn Nehru...
...Warriors is marred by the feeling that Philosopher Gray was more an observer than a participant. Though he writes of his own fears in combat, there is a curious parchment quality, underlined by a self-conscious literary style ("The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm"). Still, there are brilliant flashes: the appealing face of a young German deserter, smiling in death after being cut down from a tree where the SS had hanged him; the bewilderment and misery of French girls who had "collaborated" simply because they had fallen in love...
...Allen never expected to find himself, at 44, a key figure in the cold war's competition for prestige. He is and always has been, by inclination and intent, a "pure" scientist. His real interest is in cosmic rays. He started being curious about cosmic rays back in the prewar days when they were considered as wildly abstruse and impractical as a study of the mating habits of sea horses or the inner structure of a grasshopper's brain. But today he can tip back his head and look at the sky. Beyond its outermost blue...
...most wooden writing. The characters are talking symbols, and when Mellors and Connie do come to life in the lovemaking scenes, the reader, conditioned though he may be by modern novels of lesser stature, is not so much shocked or moved as embarrassed by Lawrence's curious, four-letter vulgarity...
Butterfly Under Glass. First done by the Bolshoi in 1946, Romeo and Juliet seems to Western eyes a curious dramatic anachronism, a bit like a brilliant butterfly under glass. As much emotion-laden pantomime as dance, it retraces virtually every twist and turn of Shakespeare's familiar plot in 13 scenes before a series of sumptuous but often ponderously literal sets. The heavily orchestrated score, boldly conducted without score by Conductor Yuri Faier (he is almost blind, can see only the dancers' silhouettes), is unabashedly romantic, gently moving in its lyric flights, occasionally distracting when the onstage movements...