Word: enigmas
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...named. Now I want specificity. Maybe it's a function of aging. I feel as if I've got less time left; I want to make sense." Not perfect sense; his later novels, like The Innocent, Black Dogs and Enduring Love, are still full of absurdity and enigma. But the characters have a more full-blooded life. Combine that with McEwan's companionable mind--strange to say of a man with such a dark disposition, but there it is--and with his intricate but unfussy prose, and you understand the gathering power of his work. Perowne finds majestic pleasure even...
...like the Great Communicator, Carson was a paradox of warm and cool, a man who made millions of Americans feel they knew him and yet was an enigma even to close associates. He was zealously private and distant to most, always approachable, rarely approached. Carson was in danger last week of posthumous teddy-bearization, with eulogists praising him as "calm" and "gentle." That wasn't even true of his TV persona--he laced his humor with sarcasm and sexual danger, and he batted Ed McMahon about like a piņata. In private Carson was standoffish and in his marriages admittedly...
...What prolonged the media attention, other than the reach of the star's eminence and the need to fill air time in a slow news week, was the enigma of Carson. Millions saw and liked him 150 times a year, yet he steadfastly hoarded the essence of his personality. "If the conversation edges toward areas in which he feels ill at ease or unwilling to commit himself," wrote Kenneth Tynan, who interviewed Carson for a 1977 New Yorker profile reprinted in the book Show People, "burglar alarms are triggered off, defensive reflexes rise around him like an invisible stockade...
...this suits him to play Howard Hughes, who was an enigma even more than he was a tycoon. A pampered rich kid, Hughes made millions in the aviation and hotel industries. As Hollywood's longest resident outsider, he directed the terrific aerial epic Hell's Angels and produced two films that defined their genres for decades: the newspaper comedy The Front Page and the gangster saga Scarface. When he wasn't flying planes, and crashing them, he was wooing glamour gals Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Best of all, Hughes was a full-time eccentric who finally achieved a madness...
...Beyond that, almost everything about the small, jug-eared infantryman-from his motivations to what his life in the North was like-remained an enigma. Was the young man nicknamed "Super" back in his hometown of Rich Square, North Carolina, really an unrepentant traitor, as the U.S. Army charged? Accusations that he had made several broadcasts across the DMZ urging others in his unit to join him in the North-not to mention his roles in a number of 1980s propaganda films as a Yankee imperialist devil-seemed to suggest that he was. Or was he kidnapped by North Korean...