Word: malignments
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Anouilh pursues his characters with mockery that is a little wistful, with sympathy that is a little malign, now capriciously making romance look grey, now perversely making reality seem gilded. At the end he casually mates the characters and whisks them out of sight like so many folding chairs. He skims over a world where things cut two ways and cancel one another out. He is very civilized, possibly overcivilized: the sort of man who would add s'il vous plaît to the Ten Commandments...
...saboteurs that not one case of enemy-directed sabotage was discovered throughout the war; this time there were no Black Tom explosions. Ranting Douglas Chandler, the "Paul Revere" of Radio Berlin, tried and convicted of treason, bitterly complained that his confession had been extracted by an FBI agent with "malign, hypnotic power...
Richard III is prentice Shakespeare (some have argued that it is not all his) and in it the early Bard catches only the surfaces of evil. But he gives Richard two thoroughly vivid characteristics: a malign, gloating wit and a flamboyant love of effect. The role is an actor's dream because Richard is himself forever acting-throwing not a dark veil but a bright light round his hypocrisies, welcoming, not wincing at his bloody crimes. Seldom has there been such joy of villainy...
...production accepted, indeed courted, Richard as melodrama. Everything was painted in bold primary colors; a good deal was literally bathed in baleful crimson light. But the thing had pace and a certain crude excitement, and Richard Whorf's usurper, limping of foot and swift of brain, was enjoyably malign. There was nothing subtle about any of it, and toward the end there was much that was strident; but if never anything more, it was a pretty good show...
...could not dominate; 3) a political seer whose prognostications were almost always wrong; 4) a self-styled "scientific" socialist whose science was about as scientific as astrology; 5) an economist whose economic knowledge was perfunctory and puerile. Marx's mind was undoubtedly diabolic (history is studded with malign political geniuses). But it is no help in understanding or combating Marxism to deny its author's perverse brilliance...