Word: highbrow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Corp. asked Hoyle to give a series of talks about "The New Cosmology" on the BBC's Third Program, aimed at some 300,000 highbrow listeners. In spite of the difficulty of his subject, Hoyle made an extraordinary hit. Audience approval, measured by BBC's sampling system, gave him a record-breaking rating. When the lectures were repeated on the Home Service for 3,000,000 listeners, the middlebrows liked them too. Published in book form, they have sold 60,000 copies, phenomenal for a scientific work...
...support Bonser's baby, Tabitha becomes the mistress of an art-mad millionaire. Soon Tabitha is reigning as queen of the millionaire's crazy bohemian circle, passing esthetic judgments with unworried ignorance and editing a highbrow magazine...
Pictures like White on White have more historic than intrinsic interest (painted 30 years ago, Malevich's solemn joke helped clear the way for later abstractionists). A few highbrow enthusiasts maintain that other paintings like the Miro and the Mondrian are really great art, and that the public will some day realize it. Be that as it may, the museum keeps buying whatever suits its own rarefied fancy, and exhibiting its finds with an air of "Close your mouth and open your eyes and I will give you a big surprise!" Last week it had on exhibition two recent...
...Statesman is read, and it does make money. Editor Martin says proudly: "I am proud of the fact that the paper has grown in influence and circulation without ever having consciously . . . played down to its audience or become less thoughtful. If it is to be called highbrow, then the number of highbrows must have enormously increased and that is in some degree our doing...
Once upon a carefree time, escapists could pick up a historical novel confident of finding a simple mixture of sword play and midnight love. Nowadays, as part of the now fashionable pedantry that corrodes everything from highbrow poetry to lowbrow science fiction, the historical novel is often as minutely researched as a Ph.D. thesis. Merchant of the Ruby, a fearsomely thorough drenching in the 15th Century Wars of the Roses, is a prime example. Readers of the Merchant need a refresher course in history, an elaborate diagram of royal genealogy, and a passionate interest in the problem of which English...