Word: gusto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many of its situations are inept, it has its interludes of fun; had Shaw but written it 60 years earlier, it would undoubtedly have been said to show promise. As it stands, it is simply a vehicle-a monster bulldozer-for Actress Hepburn, who bangs about in it with gusto. She has come far from the days when Dorothy Parker described her as running the gamut from A to B. In The Millionairess she runs it from ff to fff. The effect is often enjoyable and ultimately monotonous...
Dickens is dead-and who cares? Dickens was an old-fashioned sentimentalist who roared with laughter at his own comic caricatures and wept buckets over his pathetic children and heroines whiter (and frailer) than the driven snow. But Dickens had gusto. So did Mark Twain; so did Kipling; so did H. G. Wells...
...Gusto is not a common characteristic of present-day writers. Their most notable common trait is resignation-a resignation that sometimes dresses itself up in a splendid refusal to surrender, a defiant rejection of the unconditional terms that life demands. Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, J. P. Marquand, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh-they all record, in their various manners, the hopeless valor, the quiet desperation of a rearguard action, a doomed though indomitable next-to-last stand...
Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 50 (Schneider Quartet; Haydn Society, 6 sides LP). The sixth release (16 more records to come) of the complete cycle of 84 quartets, as performed by this ensemble last season (TIME, May 19). The music is played with a gusto that takes some of the formality out of the 18th century style...
From this position of vantage, it has been his humor to attack established institutions and the entrenched powers of political and musical bumbledom with devastating gusto. Hailing the advent of broadcasting as "the foremost misfortune that has ever overtaken this planet," he has since accused the British Broadcasting Corp. again & again of "unprecedented acts of vandalism" and of "ineffable impudence" for its "butchering of whole works" and "massacring of masterpieces." He has shushed audiences for covert whisperings, or told them outright to shut up. Over an outraged shoulder, he has hissed at them as "savages" for untimely applause...