Word: grasp
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...empire has collapsed and the point of 'Prague' is that it's the place everyone would rather be, except they have all somehow settled for Budapest as second best to their idealized Central European city?. What happens in this novel is not nearly so important as Phillip's wonderful grasp of Budapest's look, style and ethos, and his sometimes sympathetic, often scathing view of the Western interlopers. His writing is swift, often poetic, unerringly exact with voices and subtle details of time, weather and place. This novel is so complete a distillation of its theme and characters that...
This method effectively gives the reader a full, three-dimensional view of the plot, characters and historical context. Nonetheless, it can be confusing, particularly in the beginning when one does not yet have a comprehensive grasp of who all the characters are. Additionally, although the flashback from Berlin in 2003 helps to set the scene and ties in rather well with some of the obscure details that appear in the bulk of the novel, the departure from and return to the present day serve as rather weak bookends for what is a very self-contained story. The exploits...
...Religion is about where we derive our moral truths and the meaning of it all, and science is about the factual world as best as we can grasp it, they’re just different things, you can’t translate one into the other. Americans get so hung up on religion...Something like 80% of Americans testify that their conventional form of belief in a supreme being is essential to their view of life. I guess if that’s what they say, that’s what they believe...
...Isabelle Huppert) humiliates her pupils and then schemes to help them win competitions. She plays the sexual sadist with her prize student Walter (Benoit Magimel) yet engages in masochistic mutilation on her own. Erika would be quite a handful for any actress, but the great Huppert has a sure grasp on her. In this kinky, often goofy, never less than fascinating psychodrama, she makes sense of a stern, extreme personality. Huppert could be speaking to the audience as well as to Walter when she says, "I want all you want. I have all you need...
Today, a century after his heyday, it is hard to grasp the immense influence Kipling wielded through his words and images. Mark Twain described him as "the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark." It's a measure of this balanced book that Gilmour puts Kipling firmly in the context of his time but does not attempt to defend the indefensible. As he stresses, Kipling - ever the realist - touched real chords in the British psyche during the first 40 years of his life. Later...