Word: florid
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Times have changed. Now Herbert's closest aide and spokesman is Lawyer Stanley Rader, himself recently sidelined and now back in power. Rader denies that Herbert ever designated Garner Ted as his successor. In a florid churchwide encyclical, the father explains the sudden ouster by accusing his son of perfidy: "I derived my authority from the living CHRIST. You derived what you had from me, and then used it totally CONTRARY to THE WAY Christ...
Puccini: Tosca (Soprano Montserrat Caballé, Tenor José Carreras, Baritone Ingvar Wixell, orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Colin Davis conductor, Philips; 2 LPs). This interpretation of Tosca is nothing if not eccentric. Davis' reading of the florid score is rich and clear but systematically undramatic. As the idealistic painter Cavaradossi, Carreras gives a properly ardent performance, but it seems lost on this particular Tosca. The elegant Caballé can no more be made into the hot-blooded actress than the eyes of Cavaradossi's Mary Magdalen can be changed from blue...
...author obviously knows the methods of his florid villains very well -but seems to have only a casual interest in them. He nudges the story along every so often, but the entire climax is accomplished in exactly one paragraph. The rest of the time he browses amiably among his policemen. At one point the commisaris quotes a Chinese philosopher...
...only trouble with this happy tradition is that the pageant is tainted with antiSemitism. The florid script that has been in use since 1860 reflects the peasant theater of that time, when plots were full of blood and thunder, and villains were wildly villainous. Thus it not only blames the Jews for Jesus' death but turns them into a snarling mob. Even after World War II, the church approved the continuation of the pageants, but since the Second Vatican Council's condemnation of antiSemitism, the caricatures at Oberammergau have become something of an official embarrassment...
...clock of a sleepy August morning at Dartmouth. The central green, scene of continuous softball games throughout the day, is still quiet. But in 122 Silsby Hall, a short, wiry professor -with a dapper little mustache and the florid gestures of a born talker-is holding forth with enthusiasm. "I remember how frightened I was when I was first given access to Henry James' papers," he says. "They were in a basement room in Harvard's Widener Library-four tables piled high with boxes, each box containing 250 to 500 letters, plus trunks full of notebooks that...