Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Historian Malcolm Elwin doubts that she was what went wrong with the marriage. In this first study of the subject based on "unrestricted use of the Lovelace Papers," the famous collection of family letters and documents, Elwin concludes that the real villain was more probably Annabella herself. A quiet, humorless, literal-minded girl, she took all of Byron's Gothic romancing with impenetrable solemnity. For a man like Byron, thinks Elwin, the temptation to pile extravagance on extravagance must have been almost irresistible once he found an audience that responded to his frequent, mysterious allusions to "atrocious crimes...
High Time. That seemed to be the plank that interested Peralta the most. An austere, humorless man who goes to mass regularly, he has a record unblemished by any flirtation with the left, and his open affection for the U.S. was cemented during a 1940 tour of defense pests as the guest of then Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. "That was a magnificent trip." Peralta remembers. Selecting his Cabinet last week, he stuck strictly to anti-Communists but chose a majority of civilians. Peralta's Treasury Minister announced plans to cut down on the budget deficit, fire featherbedding...
Constant Fiddling. But the show is Jack Benny all the way -a distance that can be measured only by the degree of built-in admiration that each member of the audience brings into the theater. Benny himself is a natively humorless man. and perhaps because of this he has developed a spread of technical skills. He can take a line, see eight ways to deliver it. and pick the one that will best serve his double purpose: to get an immediate laugh and also to deposit a bit of Benny characterization into the listeners' minds in order to draw...
...affection for old, well-used places and things. But sometimes Sivard gets so carried away in his kindly lampoons that there is a detail too many, and the end result is no better than a merely slick magazine cover. His most impressive paintings are from that unpainted and usually humorless terrain, Russia, which Sivard saw out of the corner of his eye when in 1958 he handled negotiations for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, and came back home to Washington with enough sketches to keep his evenings and weekends busy ever since...
...drab, and he stood scarcely 5 ft. 5 in.-a full head shorter than O'Toole.) In his performance, O'Toole catches the noble seriousness of Lawrence and his cheap theatricality, his godlike arrogance and his gibbering self-doubt; his headlong courage, girlish psychasthenia, Celtic wit, humorless egotism, compulsive chastity, sensuous pleasure in pain. But there is something he does not catch, and that something is an answer to the fundamental enigma of Lawrence, a clue to the essential nature of the beast, a glimpse of the secret spring that made him tick...