Word: hypochondriacal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hypochondriac, he is always conscious of drafts. He himself has had four serious illnesses; his first wife suffered from tuberculosis and his elder daughter died of it. His wife, his daughter and his mother all died within a year. Says he, with misty eyes: "There were three coffins in my apartment that year. It became quite impossible...
...about it. Grandfather West, crusty and conservative owner of a powerful chain of magazines, looks at first to Dixon like a threat to the good life, and finally seems like the man to emulate. Dixon's father is a boozy weakling; mother is a sentimental hypochondriac. Mig Holmes, the handsome body Dixon finally marries, is a near-dipsomaniac widow of good family but dwindling fortune...
Most famed neurotic of all was Shelley. A brooding hypochondriac (Nicolson says flatly: "All creative writers are hypochondriacs . . . all creative writers are nervous"), Shelley was long obsessed with the conviction that he had tuberculosis. Once, overcome by the thought that he had caught elephantiasis from a lady with thick legs, he fell on the floor and writhed with an imagined attack of the disease. On another occasion he had a hallucination that he had seen a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him. But Nicolson insists that Shelley was "on the whole" sane: "After all, even...
...sympathetic even when he tries to destroy the love of two young people. But the most spectacular playing last night was done by Ethel Griffies, in the role of the professor's mother. The part has little relation to the story, but the comedy of this ancient hypochondriac is almost worth the price of orchestra seats. The other actors fill in smoothly, except perhaps for the one playing the young girl in love, whose stylized cuteness is like nothing seen off the stage. The sets are a little too elegant for the homes of underpaid English schoolmasters, but they...
...year later, now healthy but a mild hypochondriac, he came back to the air, began his present half-hour show. Its main attractions: a ten-minute sketch involving a guest star and a short stroll down the most famed of all airlanes: Allen's Alley...