Word: lilt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thorough, precise and methodical. Almost perversely, it stops short of risking deep perception of the playwright or his plays: it focuses instead on a tedious hunt for the minutiae of names, addresses and trivial incidents that made their way from Williams' life into his art. Spoto's writing lacks lilt, and his themes often bog down in a glut of detail. The book's most conspicuous shortcoming is an absence of the engaging Williams voice and personality as they emerged in his chatty, scurrilous Memoirs (1975). Spoto, who did not know his subject personally, captures neither the man's whimsy...
Bush could be hampered by his Establishment background (old money, Andover, Yale) and his brittle mien. His somewhat shrill voice, unmodulated even after professional coaching, could grate next to Ferraro's homey lilt. "He sounds a little too hyper, a little too screechy," the ex-aide concedes...
...beginning all seems very placid and sweet. On a sunny morning, James Tyrone (Kevin Walker) and his wife Mary (Deborah Carroll) are leaving the breakfast table where their sons are still chatting animatedly. He showers her with compliments, his doting voice touched with a gentle Irish lilt. She fusses coquettishly with her hair and teases him lovingly about his snoring. Soon, however, we learn that Mary is not only trying to overcome a morphine addiction, but also is fraught with worry for her frail younger son Edmund, whose "summer cold" shows signs of being consumption. The elder son Jamie...
...founds a primary school devoted to "the fusion of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem...astronomers and God-praises uniting in a majestic dream of peace." However, his impatience and frustration with the mediocrity of both students and teachers soon causes his sense of alienation to resurface. Not until Hester Lilt, a renowned academic, enrolls her daughter Beulah in the school does Brill begin to show a genuine interest in the progress of his pupils...
...Western Civilization." But the experiment flops. Hopelessly inept as a pedagogue and judge of children, Brill blames his school's failure on its students, whom he dismisses as "commoners, weeds, the children of plumbers." Given such contempt, he fails to recognize genius when it comes his way. Beulah Lilt, who sits immobile | and mute in the classroom, is destined to become a great artist. Poor Beulah! i A quiet, tiny child, self-immured, she seems to suffer from "an unremitting bewilderment," much like the young Cynthia Ozick, as she recalls herself. In the novel, Ozick has reserved some...