Word: foretokens
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...present state of mystery writing does not foretoken a renaissance. By the customary criteria applied to genre fiction--the number of active practitioners whose works have graduated to mainstream best-seller lists or to critical appraisal as "serious" literature--the mystery can offer only Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald and perhaps Julian Symons. Dozens of purported successors to Christie have been proclaimed, largely on the basis of gender, but none has sustained anything like her productivity or cunning. Every publishing season brings a promising debut, but the vast majority of these writers never again produce a book with the freshness...
What is striking about the book, however, is that it is so entertaining. Holroyd manages to make each successive phase of Shaw's life seem significant of itself, rather than simply as a foretoken of what was to come or as raw material for the plays. Even minor figures often have a Dickensian vividness. Each romantic indiscretion has its own distinct flavor; Holroyd pinpoints which of Shaw's innumerable affairs he believes were consummated, and quotes bawdy letters in proof. Even more precisely evoked are Shaw's nonsexual passions for comrades in causes, from his schoolmate Matthew McNulty...
...work demands its own." He could etch the tranquillity of the soaring horizon of the lowlands as did Rembrandt. In one etching of 1888, Stars at the Cemetery, he used sulphur to corrode the copper plate, producing a luminous scumbled blanket like a modern abstractionist. Or equally, Ensor could foretoken the surrealists, as in his ironic view of a flaking skeleton titled My Portrait...
...report passed through the censorship of Egypt, now engaged in a violent propaganda war with Iraq. The sketchy account provided few details. But if the report is true, it could foretoken a new cold war explosion over the Middle East...
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