Word: distraction
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Peter Temple's direction maintained a suitably brisk pace, but a brief interplay of mugging between Miss Revere and Finnegan in the first act served only to distract the audience from a crucial piece of early exposition...
...London failed to find much true artistic classicism. Instead, without the usual nightmarish litter to distract them, critics and gallerygoers were spotting some old Dali shortcomings more clearly than ever. The London Times dismissed Dali's recent work as "trivial and irreverent . . . singularly banal." In the Daily Express, Critic Osbert Lancaster applied the most devastating label of all: Victorian. In his "laborious accuracy and painstaking attention to detail," said Lancaster, Dali reminded him of some "minor academician" of Victoria's Royal Academy...
...Ancelots are lower down in the social scale, but just as disorganized. Papa Ancelot, a shoestring operator in the stock market, rails at his giddy daughters for going around with gigolos. But the daughters have found that they can distract Papa from his tirades by pushing him into the receptive arms of the housemaid. Mama and daughters work up fervors over Russian films, talk yearningly about the coming French revolution. One daughter guesses that 500,000 heads will fall. "I find [the idea] breathtakingly pure," replies Mama Ancelot...
...further illustrate the weakness of most people's power of concentrates, Boring asks the class to count the number of clicks ticked off by a machine. He starts the machine, then tries to distract students by miscounting with them, He turns off the device and asks for the total. Most people offer the wrong number, Boring says...
...that decision will be made in Moscow, not in Washington. And since the U.S. insists on minimizing Asia, why not (Stalin may reason) pick off the rest of Asia, starting with Korea, continuing with Indo-China, gobbling up Malaya and Indonesia, meanwhile rattling the saber in Europe to distract American effort...