Word: lacing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WITHOUT LOVE, by Gerald Hanley (245 pp.; Harper; $3.50), has a theme that might be described as disgrace under pressure. Mike Brennan, the seedy son of a lace-curtain London-Irish family, is hanging around present-day Barcelona waiting to commit just one last political murder before he tells all to a priest. Like Britain's London-Irish William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), Brennan had fallen out of the church into Mosley's Blackshirts. Via the Nazi SS, he becomes, by double desertion, a journeyman executioner for Russia's secret police. Yet he is not a devoted...
...Lace & Mendelssohn. The wonder of Elgar's career (he died in 1934 at 76) was not that he failed to become a great composer but that he accomplished as much as he did in the stale, lace-curtained musical atmosphere of mid-Victorian Worcester, where he grew up. The fresh gusts of new music blowing off the Continent never stirred Worcester, and Elgar did not venture as far as London until he was 22. His father was a church organist and sometime piano tuner, and Elgar was raised on warmed-over Mendelssohnian oratorios and cantatas. He played the bassoon...
...needed. He hacked down Gogol's sprawling list of characters to a manageable 13, set to work composing a score to match the author's farcical tale of a provincial town paralyzed by the news that a civil-service inspector is on the way to investigate its lace-curtain vices. The Schwetzingen Festival (near Heidelberg) gave Composer Egk a handsome, cartoon-style production (by noted Stage Director Gunther Rennert), with the opera's townspeople outlandishly garbed in a mid-19th century assortment of green swallow-tailed coats, crimson velvet caps and propeller-sized bow ties...
Author Ellin Mackay Berlin (Lace Curtain, Land I Have Chosen) wrote this book as a kind of sentimental duty to the past. By the time the upstart Mackays had become aristocratic, she herself outraged her Roman Catholic family in 1926 by marrying Songwriter Irving Berlin, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. She notes with wonder that her grandmother was born in an East Side slum only a few blocks away from where, 50 years later, Irving Berlin spent his childhood. With just such a sense of place she moves competently from the mining disasters in the Comstock to the horrors...
...results so far have been seen in spiders fed with serum taken from patients suffering from the catatonic form of schizophrenia. The spiders seem to become catatonic too. They move listlessly and spend much time in their houses; the webs they spin are like the last vestiges of ragged lace. The spiders' reaction, like that of human volunteers injected with schizophrenic serum (TIME, May 14), shows that this disease is associated with a disorder in blood chemistry...