Word: dour
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Potting Shed is much less dour than The Living Room, not only because at the end James Callifer has found a measure of faith, but because the whole play is concerned with faith and not with sin, and because it pivots on a priestly uncle who fortifies rather than fails the protagonist. And though neither play fully sustains itself, the last-act letdown of The Potting Shed is more like that in The Cocktail Party. Here, Greene the playwright takes a whole act for what the novelist could wind up in a chapter...
...Evangelist Charles Potter, 45, was in high gear last week on an experiment called the North Birmingham Industrial Crusade. Through a three-square-mile area of dour, industrial Birmingham, Potter and his fellow crusaders are swarming in a "saturation campaign" designed to test the chances of evangelizing the segment of Britain that Billy Graham largely failed to reach-the workers. Potter's plan is not to rack up as many "decisions for Christ" as possible, but to stimulate discussion along Christian lines, eventually organize "Christian cells in the factories-Communism in reverse...
Since not even all Communist leaders are alike, the Kremlin tries to put their differences to work. The result is something like an old-fashioned cuckoo clock with a smiling face emerging to indicate sunshine and a dour face to indicate storm. The idea used to work like clockwork, too: dour or smiling, the face was still Communist. But the leaders whom the Kremlin now has to call on are men.who have suffered for their deviations, Marxists with the mark of Communist prisons on them, and ideas of their own. The men called back to power in Hungary last week...
...Dour and crotchety, Julio Lozano never had any noteworthy popular support. He rode into the vice-presidency in 1948 under President Juan Manuel Galvez (the rebel major's father). In 1954, when presidential elections ended in a no-majority stalemate, Lozano happened to be sitting in for the ailing President Galvez, and seized power. Last August, hit one-two by an attempted barracks uprising and a case of high blood pressure, he turned over his authority briefly to a junta headed by General Rodriguez, then persuaded Galvez to stand in again as chief of state and went to Miami...
...spite of their hardships and deprivations, Gusinde reports, the Pygmies are a smiling, happy people. They commit no crimes and they wage no wars, while the better-fed people of the lush lowlands are both dour and bloodthirsty...