Word: maitlands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. Bill Maitland is a modern antihero, muddled by progress, maddened by the machine and mangled by his all-too-painful awareness that he is irredeemably mediocre. With astounding authority, 28-year-old Nicol Williamson nets all the screeching humor and curdling vituperation from John Osborne's whirlpool of words...
Osborne's anti-hero is Bill Maitland, a London solicitor hung up on booze, barbiturates and the bleak self-knowledge that he is "irredeemably mediocre." He is pushing 40, a tooth-shy, flea-bitten leopard, all spots and no strength, restlessly, frantically, pacing the cage of his life-in-death. "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost," wrote Dante; Inadmissible Evidence is, among other things, a threnody on the middle years, laced with caustic humor...
What has matured in Bill Maitland is not himself but his fears, guilts and anxieties. His skin has become thinner, not thicker, and he flares up with the irascible sensitivity of thwarted desires, blighted hopes. He must flog a body that is losing its resilience, and he smells death's bad breath at dawn. He envies the young for being young and for possessing the integrity that has eroded in him, the appetite for life that has cloyed on his palate, and the courage that has been drowned. Locked in hell's isolation ward of self, he claws...
...Maitland's tormented hallucination, and the play's device, that he is in a spectral dock on trial on a self-accusing charge-that his life has become an obscenity. The inner motion of this drama is the ritual of exorcism; Maitland wants to banish the voracious demons of his mind and conscience. But his witnesses are all mirror images of his decay, shadowy chroniclers of loss, rejection, betrayal and defeat. His upbraided, long-suffering clerks are walking legal briefs drawn up against Maitland's corrosive contempt for his work. His wife is Maitland's petition...
Community of Nations. Moderator of this global forum is Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a vigorous, white-haired, bushy-browed man of 69 who qualifies for the post both by lineage and interest. Grandnephew of Grant's Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, and son of a U.S. diplomat (D. Maitland Armstrong. U.S. consul general to Italy in 1871), Armstrong served briefly as a military attache in the U.S. consulate in Belgrade in 1919 before becoming European correspondent for the New York Evening Post. Then, in 1922, the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of Manhattan financiers, lawyers and businessmen, started Foreign...