Word: insightfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although new "insight" into the operations of our CIA [June 20] may be a long-awaited victory for the press and interesting information for readers, who in his right mind can claim that this big publicity push is good...
...felons until, surrounded by nothing but villainy, the reader grows weary and even skeptical. Substandard hyperbole ("We realized that behind almost every horror stood a banker") and doctrinaire populism ("They are making a desert and calling it a balanced budget") further reduce the authors' credibility. Invective obscures insight. John Lindsay was not merely an inadequate mayor but "a volunteer cuckold of the permanent government." The clubhouse crowd is condemned as "back-room dreck," though in fact it produces some good administrators...
Until now. This brisk, critical Life operates under a great handicap: Pritchett does not read Russian; literary and biographical sources come almost entirely from translations. But the author has the compensating virtues of insight and wit. Turgenev's oeuvre has long been accessible to an English-speaking audience; The Gentle Barbarian at last makes the neglected author as approachable as his work...
...back, hoping it will overtake him. But when he turns toward Saxton, his home, he finds it empty of meaning, as insensible as the coal to which his father has mortgaged his existence. "It's no good hanging on," Colin finally tells the older woman he deserts, with sudden insight. The alternative, beautifully inevitable in Saville, is to walk fearlessly ahead into a vacant future, armed only with the prayer that life, freed from its bondage to the past, is indeed limitless...
...unbridgeably divide themselves into old and new money seems to come as a surprise to Birmingham, whose naivete in such matters -whether real or feigned-quickly becomes cloying. After ten years of traveling among a growing list of ethnic elites, he has little excuse for such a lack of insight into the phenomena he purports to study...