Word: dourness
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...serious side of De Vries has been subject to considerable analysis, most of it attempts to align the author's dour Dutch Calvinist upbringing with his development as a comic writer. To borrow a De Vriesian analogy, such treatment is like putting the reader into a diving bell and taking him down 3 ft. His latest novel counters that effect by granting his fans a chance to wet their feet once again in the forbidding shallows of sex, money and social class...
...QUITE A CAST of characters. Prince Charles and Princess Diana--the fairy the couple locked in endless quarrels. The rakish Prince Philip, disdainful of life in Buckingham Palace. His imperturbable wife, Queen Elizabeth II. The dour Princess Anne, lining up a TV interview to pay for her plane ticket to Australia. The family rogue, Prince Andrew, smuggling porn actresses into the palace when his mother leaves on holiday. Prince Edward, ever dumb and awkward...
...only 46. He devotes enormous energy to + each performance. At the 1983 University of Michigan graduation exercises, the audience was not hot for him at first: the seniors were naturally rather self- absorbed, and a commencement speech, after all, is just a commencement speech. But no, Iacocca is not dour or hortatory. When he finished with the graduates 45 minutes later, some 14,000 people were on their feet, cheering and stomping. At last year's Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, the annual gathering of the city's political Establishment, Bob Hope unwisely chose to perform after Iacocca...
When Louis XIV outlawed the Protestant Huguenots in France, thousands of them came to Geneva, bringing their skills as watchmakers, jewelers, merchants, bankers. Within a century they had helped make dour Geneva one of the richest cities in the world. It still forbade theatrical performances as sinful, so Voltaire acquired a new house just across the French border in order to stage his plays. Today Geneva boasts a refurbished Grand Theater (it had been gutted in 1951 when something went wrong during one of the more fiery scenes in Wagner's Die Walkure), but there is still very little night...
There was something about Eugene O'Neill's dour eminence as the trailblazer of serious American drama that made his critics and colleagues want to crack wise. While he toiled to bring Euripidean depth and grandeur to domestic melodrama, the nimble midgets in attendance played at defacing his stature. Strange Interlude ran for 4 1/2 hours and an impressive 426 performances; road companies packed the provinces for three seasons after its 1928 opening; the play brought O'Neill his third Pulitzer Prize, and sped him on to a Nobel in 1936. And still the jesters japed. Critic Alexander Woollcott, noting...