Word: luridly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lawyer-and his reputation as a "bomber" who can turn a marital split-up into an expensive war-dates from 1964, when he won a $2 million settlement for Actor James Mason's ex-wife Pamela. That case, settled before Mitchelson could call his 43 witnesses and extract lurid testimony about the Mason marriage, established Mitchelson's style: the messier the case he could prepare, the bigger the settlement. Says Mitchelson with a smile: "These were the weapons of the system," Since California adopted no-fault divorce in 1969, such weapons have been largely set aside...
Saul K. Padover, distinguished American political scientist (Jefferson: A Biography, Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Freedom), wrestles with these problems for 667 pages; the result is a fascinating draw. A self-described "Jeffersonian democrat," Padover exhibits an intimate and often lurid portrait. As an adolescent, Marx embraced Christ, then, in a long hysterical poem, identified himself with Lucifer. During the exhausting research and writing of Das Kapital, he was plagued by illnesses ranging from carbuncles to chronic liver inflammation. Padover shows the father of socialism distracting himself from the pain and humiliation of a carbuncle on the scrotum...
Richard Strauss: Salome (Soprano Hildegard Behrens, Mezzo Agnes Baltsa, Tenor Karl-Walter Bohm, Baritone Jose Van Dam, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan conductor, Angel; 2 LPs). With Karajan, the orchestral music comes first, even in opera. Here he conducts a vibrant, sensuous performance of Strauss's lurid opera. Behrens as Salome may lack the cruel edge of Birgit Nilsson's performance on London. But Behrens' pure voice contrasts chillingly with Salome's lust, while Van Dam's ringing Jochanaan is a saintly counterpoint in a savage world...
...JEREMY SEDUCED ME, read a tittering headline in London's tabloid Daily Mail, as Britain's most lurid crime story in years entered a particularly purple phase. For a second week, a three-judge panel in Minehead, a remote town on the Somerset coast, was conducting a magistrate's hearing into charges that Jeremy Thorpe, 49, the dapper, old Etonian Liberal M.P. who had once been one of Britain's fastest rising political stars, had conspired to murder Norman Scott. A sometime male model, Scott had publicly proclaimed that he had once had a homosexual affair...
...standard of judgment can still be applied: "By their fruits ye shall know them." Visionaries, even when they operate from a cult, can bring dimensions of aspiration and change to religion, which otherwise might be merely a moral policeman. But the historical record of cults is ominous and often lurid. Jonestown, for all its gruesome power to shock, has its religious (or quasireligious) precedents...