Word: excessives
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...company. He is a riveting performer, with a delicate, Chaplinesque face atop a strong, bulbous body. For a while last year he wore his hair in a thick mass of long black curls that would have done credit to a baroque grandee. In motion he radiates amplitude verging on excess. In One Charming Night, a dance set to four Purcell songs, he presents his own outrageously funny version of the old warhorse Le Spectre de la Rose, leaping and swooping with abandoned ardor around his seated beloved (Teri Weksler). But unlike Fokine's blithe spirit, Morris does not finish...
...Wretched excess comes in many forms. Theologians distinguish the excess called avarice--the sheer, mean taking and hoarding of things--from the excess called prodigality, which is a messier and more full-blooded fault, a form of generosity, almost, but one that has come unhinged. Ideally, world-class plundering should try to pay its way as entertainment. The Romans had a genius for transforming loot into colossally vulgar display, ostentation on an imperial scale. The Emperor Elagabalus, it is said, ordered his slaves to bring him 10,000 lbs. of cobwebs. When they finished the task, Elagabalus observed, "From this...
There were other surprises. Men who played vigorous sports like squash and full-court basketball to excess -- burning more than 3,500 calories a week -- went past the point of positive returns and had higher death rates than their more moderate colleagues. Equally unexpected was the finding that those who had put on at least 15 lbs. since graduation lived longer than alumni who had gained less; the researchers speculate this may have been because some of the latter suffered from wasting diseases. And the risk of death was high for former varsity athletes who stayed unusually active or slacked...
...misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does...
...nobility--and for disillusion and betrayal. Boston- based M.E. Hirsh, 38, tends to be a bit long-winded: Kabul's 445 pages could have been trimmed. Still, this is an instance of that rare genre, the moral thriller whose personae are vigorous enough to cut through any amount of excess narrative...