Word: duelist
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...Mona Lisa a great painting, Les Sylphides a great ballet, or Clair de Lune a great piece of music? Not really, but they are all sentimental favorites. So it is with Cyrano de Bergerac. Both the play and its hero are more than a trifle silly. Yet this poet-duelist ham who boasts of besting 100 men in a single encounter has proved endearing...
Raul is a good subject, a tangle of immaturities held together by intelligence. He hides as much of the jumble as he can behind a pose that is half self-satire. The "Black Prince," as he calls himself in mockery, is a mannered, deadly literary duelist who slices fellow students and blundering adults into home fries with razor-edged misquotations. The Black Prince is a devilish smoker of cigarettes and a virgin, who is torn between self-disgust at this fault and contempt for the mawkishness of teen-age passion...
Venomous Toad. Pope lived in a violent age. The celebrated Augustan calm was genuine marble, but it was a pavement laid over cellars where every violence flourished. Voltaire was cudgeled for his sharp tongue. Dr. Johnson was threatened by an offended duelist. Pope himself had seen his coreligionists, the Roman Catholic gentlemen of northern England, led, bound by halters, through the violent Protestant mobs of London. Such circumstances must give an edge of sincerity to satire. Pope's verses, light as dragonflies yet possessed of tempered strength, were written under the shadow of heavy penalties...
John Boyd-Carpenter, 51, Minister of Pensions. Grandson of the "silvertongued" Bishop of Ripon who was Queen Victoria's favorite preacher, Boyd-Carpenter is an effective verbal duelist in the House of Commons, a stickler for detail, and a vigorous administrator who is likely to get any particularly tough chore facing the Macmillan administration...
...French mock hero of Five A.M. has a bad case of the hoo-ha's. His creator, Jean Dutourd. 36, is an accomplished satirical duelist (A Dog's Head, The Best Butter) who likes nothing better than to blood his pen on the foibles and pomposities of the French middleclass. He subscribes to the Andre Malraux dictum that France is "saturated with lies," and attacks those lies with what the French call "intellectual rigor." In Five A.M. this verges on intellectual rigor mortis, for Author Dutourd finds and leaves his novel's pathetic protagonist more dead than...