Word: humdrums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stop. He was only seven that year, but he had an attack of writer's itch, and with the same zest another boy his age might have used to dismember a grasshopper, Payne wrote The True Adventures of Princess Sylvia. His manuscript showed a youthful disdain for humdrum fact, e.g., he set Princess Sylvia to reign not only over Denmark, but over all of Asia as well. The main thing was that his writer's itch turned chronic. This week, at 40, he published his 43rd book, a biography of General George C. Marshall...
From his eight years in the Far East came a whole shelf of books ranging from an anthology of Chinese poetry (The White Pony] to a biography, Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China. At least one well-informed reviewer attacked the Mao book for its disdain of humdrum fact. Wrote scholarly Dr. Hu Shih, onetime Chinese Ambassador to the U.S.: "Empty padding . . . falsified history." Such adverse judgments are among the hazards a one-man writing factory runs. Payne works admittedly from what is at hand in public libraries, has an uncommon knack for converting a shelf of books...
...story's Wilder-style "hero" is an unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who has been broken from big-city dailies to a job covering the humdrum local news of Albuquerque. Hungering for a break that will send him back to the big time, he stumbles on a disaster reminiscent of the Floyd Collins story of 1925: a cave-in has pinned Leo Minosa, owner of a roadside curio shop, deep in a nearby labyrinth of ancient Indian cliff dwellings...
...tepid calm of the election campaign hardly changed in the homestretch. Most meetings were humdrum, badly attended, polite. There were only a few brawls. In Nice, Communists and Gaullists clashed in a gun fight: three Communists were wounded. In Paris, leftists and Gaullists broke up a meeting of followers of former Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain who were campaigning for his release...
Sweden's Viveca Lindfors gives a performance that puts Hollywood to shame for having wasted her talent in humdrum roles. But none of the well-cast principals can outshine a large group of minor actors playing returning prisoners of war and their families in a long emotional sequence of reunion at a railway station...