Word: deviled
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...Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet-haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash-who jolts the play occasionally into the corrosive credibility it ought to sustain throughout...
...very little understanding of the problems within his ecclesiastical home. His approach to the priest has been obsequious, only because that is the way we trained him. He has looked at the priest as a celestial magician, and cannot fathom the exodus as anything but the work of the devil...
...called the Devil's Woodyard in the 18th century, when brawling lumberjacks settled there. Now called Lamar, the bleak little tobacco town of 1,350 in eastern South Carolina was convulsed last week in another kind of violence, an atavistic rebellion against the influx of black children to a predominantly white school...
...whether you think technological civilization is beneficial. Personally, I like it, but I'm not convinced it is a viable creation. It may destroy itself." Destruction was the first and still remains the cardinal function of war as such-and therein lies the true motive of these devil's advocates. By stating the case for war, they are stating the case against mankind...
Into this amicable stasis Murdoch introduces a favorite character of hers, the mean, mysterious catalyst. This time it is a famous scientist named Julius King, who is a latter-day lago, if not the Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence...