Word: lesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hyams did not push himself harder, for Capricorn One could be better. If the film had a few fewer plot holes, a bit more narrative depth and far less signposting dialogue, it might even have been a space-age Manchurian Candidate. A classier cast would also have helped. Gould, Holbrook and Waterston are all in fine, easygoing form, but Brolin and Simpson are useless heroes: they are not big enough stars or good enough actors to make us care about their fates...
...like Macavity,/ There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity"). John Betjeman, England's reigning poet laureate, displays a light touch at vers de société; Robert Graves is captured in several nonmythic moods. A couple of songs by Nöel Coward read less jauntily than they sing. Auden the anthologist did not let Auden the splendid comic poet into his book. Amis generously corrects this blunder...
...leading lights of Amis' collection are frequently less than well known. One of the book's funniest poems, period, is an ironic encomium to an organ grinder by C.S. Calverley (1831-84). A typical stanza...
...marvelous amazon. Let me kiss your lips." Curtiss put quest before scruple: "After all, I figured, the letters are unique and there are plenty of women who must like this kind of approach or he wouldn't have continued using it." In fact, the chore was less onerous than she had feared. "I must hand it to the Rumanians," she confided to her diary. "Their idea of impotence in old age is the Anglo-Saxon notion of potency in the prime of life...
...nightly tries to animate a subject like inflation. Boredom isn't something journalists like to acknowledge; it is merely endured. That ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," wouldn't seem a curse to a journalist. Editors deal in novelty and discovery; the negative and less talked-about side of this is knowing when to spare the reader the overfamiliar. Newsweek editors were once oddly attached to a cynical acronym, MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), applied to subjects they didn't want to hear more about. But anticipatory boredom can lead to being sated...