Word: harridans
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...hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building stone, and an absent-minded magician performs a couple of genuine miracles, transforming wine into water and raising a man from the dead. The show under the big top is even more spectacular. It offers a unicorn that pops balloons...
...Anne Baxter plays the Italian princess and the former mistress with a likable and knowing broadness. Hume Cronyn's cigar-smoking millionaire sounds a bit too much like George Burns, but his Hugo is a masterpiece of foxy pomposity. Best of all is Jessica Tandy, first as the harridan in Maud and then as the great man's dry, abused wife. She endows the woman with an odd gallantry that Coward himself may have possessed...
...mother is a nightmare Yiddisher mama, a shrieking, swooping, loony harridan who plies her son with brimming trays full of food. Papa is a smalltime Italian hood who looks like an eggplant with a two-day growth of beard...
...almost all the color pictures included in the book. When she died, on August 5, 1962, she was 36 years old and was at the peak of her beauty, although some reviewers noted that the lines around her eyes in the Bern Stern portraits showed the outlines of a "harridan." To some others, those photographs show the most openess, the promise that all the pictures of her in bathtubs with gauze covering the defects could not deliver...
...contemporary age seems more drawn to Elizabeth as a heroine. Far from being the cold harridan some histories used to portray, she was deeply emotional, a supremely complex and contradictory woman. She was also, even as legend has it, probably a virgin. Highly sexual, she was yet terrified of sex, which in her experience was associated with the death of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and of many of those she loved. "I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married," she once said. Paradoxically she was, in her own way, a very feminine woman who could...