Word: epical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With the creation of Delta Force, we can concentrate our hero worship on a much smaller--and more elite--band of tough guys. Our fascination with the unit has not been in the least tempered by its epic failure in its only real test, the disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages from Iran...
...often understandable -- and hatred of alien invasion. That is as true today as it always was. In spite of all this, the American attitude remains unique. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic. It is still symbolized by that old copper-plated cliche, the Statue of Liberty, notwithstanding the condescension and the awful poetry of the famous Emma Lazarus lines ("the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...
...epic is possible because America is an idea as much as it is a country. America has nothing to do with allegiance to a dynasty and very little to do with allegiance to a particular place, but everything to do with allegiance to a set of principles. To immigrants, those principles are especially real because so often they were absent or violated in their native lands. It was no accident in the '60s and '70s, when alienation was in flower, that it often seemed to be "native" Americans who felt alienated, while aliens or the children of aliens upheld...
Ever since the grandiose failure of Sir Peter Hall's staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth two summers ago, Wagnerites have been anticipating the San Francisco Opera's new production of the epic four-evening cycle. For although it is common knowledge in the opera world that there are not enough voices of heroic Wagnerian caliber around these days, just put on a Ring and watch the paying customers line...
...three years ago while filming The Thorn Birds for TV and ended up turning their onscreen marriage into the real thing. When Rosie made three, nine months ago, the English actress and Australian actor began scheduling their professional work in relays. Ward just finished filming Fortress, an Australian survivalist epic for HBO in which she plays a school marm who is kidnaped and imprisoned along with nine of her charges. "It's Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Lord of the Flies," says Ward, who reports that while mommy was bearing arms on the set, daddy had the arm-cradling duty...