Word: dooms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Captain Gilson's The Pirate Aeroplane, Anthony (The Prisoner of Zenda] Hope's Sophy of Kravonia and Marjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan were among Greene's favorites. The shape of villainy, the sense of impending doom soon intrude. Captain Gilson's book was dominated by a bad "Yankee pirate with an aeroplane like a box kite and bombs the size of tennis balls." The Viper, he admits, gave him a permanent vision of "perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again...
Chandler was also guilty of occasional pontification, but his saving grace was a matter-of-fact, incongruous humor. In Macdonald, the laboring faces and the aura of overhanging doom are intended as symbolic of general existential despair and specific revulsion against California materialism. The trouble is that the symbols are strewn on the page like shorthand glyphs rather than metaphors. As Macdonald used to know, and now seems to forget, the order of imperatives in mystery writing is plot first, red herrings second, and philosophizing last...
...Jason Higgs (Sidney Poitier), a radical organizer who plots a theoretically infallible payroll robbery. But harassed by police and chivied by a disciple of nonviolence (Al Freeman Jr.), Jason seems cursed from the opening. When the robbery erupts into blood and death, it is only a formal ratification of doom. Jason's descent from provocateur to fugitive and his ultimate Tristan and Isolde death scene with a white chick (Joanna Shimkus) are even stagier and more predictable...
...will, especially if they are British. The latest is David Divine, a military correspondent for the London Sunday Times, who prefers strategy to stones. He has wrung from the grassy ruins evidence to show how Domitian's mistake, and the very existence of the wall, prefigured the eventual doom of Roman Britain...
...Line. That the doom was a long time coming-more than 250 years-may be credited in part to the tactical genius of another, greater emperor. Hadrian had been ruling barely five years when, in A.D. 122, a frontier tour brought him to the site of the wall. He evolved (personally, according to Divine) a radical new defense plan that helped in part to lend his name to the wall. Previously, Roman soldiers had been stationed in fortlets behind the barrier; from these they were ready to be rushed to threatened segments whenever an attack was mounted. Hadrian added cavalry...