Word: familiar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ROMEO AND JULIET. Franco Zeffirelli turns one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays into a movie of stunning immediacy. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, as the passionate, star-crossed lovers, perform with a maturity beyond their years...
Then the Mayor quoted the familiar lines from Yeats' The Second Coming...
...years, Peking opera has been not only the most popular of all the Chinese operatic styles but practically a national pastime. The plots are familiar tales about kings and concubines, scholars and lute-playing ladies. The performers, in elaborate costumes and makeup, convey their characterizations through a series of ritualistic actions and formal gestures (the closing of a door, for example, is indicated by bringing the hands together). Although shrill and piercing to Western ears, the singing is delicately modulated and full of virtuoso flourishes, which Chinese audiences applaud with shouts of "Hao!" Realism, not Ritual. After the Communist takeover...
This kind of partisan polarity is as familiar to Americans as Sears Roebuck and peanut butter. But since World War II, modern scholarship has nitpicked Turner to death-on grounds of detailed inaccuracy and cloudy thinkng. Parrington has been buried by the New Criticism as a prejudiced bore and a square to boot-both of which he most emphatically was. Beard has not so much been demolished as deplored for his slighting of the non-economic complexities of history...
...disappeared with secret files that could ruin the negotiations. Alan Turner, a counterespionage agent reminiscent of the half-burnt-out, seedy Alec Leamas of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, has been sent from London to find Harting and recapture the missing documents. So far, a familiar situation. But Turner's main antagonists are not foreign spies; they are the British embassy officials themselves-a caste-conscious, emotionally aborted, washed-out crew of professional liars...