Word: lessing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...school of historians, he argues, insists on playing down the moral issue of slavery as of little or no importance. Some go so far as to declare that the whole struggle was a tragic blunder that could have been avoided by more discussion, less action...
...Harlequinade (by Terence Rattigan; produced by Maurice Evans in association with Stephen Mitchell) stars Maurice Evans and Edna Best in a double bill requiring their British accents. As playwrighting, it is not too far from double bilge; Rattigan's study of a defeated schoolmaster is only a shade less routine than his spoofing of ham actors. As entertainment, however, there is a substantial difference between the two. The Browning Version, besides being almost exhilaratingly grim, gives everybody a chance to act; A Harlequinade 'encourages everybody to over-cavort...
Alabaster & Antipathy. Never married, he was always in love. When he first met the tiny, cigar-smoking and betrousered George Sand sulking at a soiree, he exclaimed, "What an antipathetic person ... Is it really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it." He claimed she was his mistress for less than a year, but he lived with her and depended on her care and solicitude for almost the rest of his life. When her children finally forced them apart, he was lost without...
...Union des Pĕcheurs de Paris cheerfully admitted that "because the Seine is the drainage ditch of the world, all fish taken from it are blind, hunchbacked and constipated," in addition to being rather small. Total weight of the afternoon's catch (three minnows): 25 grams (less than an ounce...
Kuiper is a serious astronomer who holds himself loftily above the little vanities of man. But his theory, which requires no rare catastrophe for the formation of planets, makes it much less likely that man is alone in the universe. The sun is an ordinary star, of very common size, temperature and chemical composition. If it has acquired planets in the normal course of its development, many millions of similar stars may have planets too. If so, there is a chance that high forms of life, perhaps higher than man, have developed on some of them...