Word: masks
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...amount of cold, planners' efficiency or warm, individual hospitality could mask the sense that things were not quite what they had been meant to be at the 1980 Olympic Games. The reason, of course, was the fact that more than 30 nations, including the U.S., West Germany, Japan and Canada, stayed at home to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in a boycott promulgated by Washington. Sixteen other nations registered their disapproval by displaying the Olympic flag rather than their national colors during the opening ceremonies, which were presided over by Communist Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev and Lord Killanin...
...small wonder that his biography is subtitled The Mask Behind the Mask. But after the final disguise there was a man of enormous gifts and conflicts. Although he was third-generation show business-both parents and a grandparent were music hall entertainers -Sellers preferred to recall that his ancestry included Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and 18th century British Boxing Champion Daniel Mendoza. The boy dreamed of a career in journalism, "the Spanish Civil War covered exclusively by Peter Sellers," but in adolescence he was claimed by comedy. In the R.A.F. he amused airmen by imitating a series of officers...
...selfishness: "I figured something like this would happen so I took a course and became a minister of the Universal Light Church Inc," one said. Others talked--seriously--of going to Canada, of going underground, of becoming conscientious objectors should the draft resume. But the personal motives mask a core of political beliefs. Americans may have forgotten about Vietnam, but it doesn't take much to remind them, and draft registration brings memories back to the surface. Exxon and Mobil will be distressed to learn that large numbers of America's youth think oil isn't worth dying for. "What...
...direct and suffused with melancholy, the poems were carried into the trenches of World War I by thousands of "lads," few of whom knew anything of the author-just as the poet wished. A Cambridge don who shunned any mention of his verse, Housman hid behind a late-Victorian mask of colorless propriety. The flamboyant London literary scene of the turn of the century left him cold. "He was like an absconding cashier," recalled Max Beerbohm. "We certainly wished he would abscond...
Biographer Graves (Lawrence of Arabia and His World) pierces that mask to show a man Max might have admired: a homosexual wrestling with his "curse," an atheist, gourmet, lover of nonsense verse and devoted companion to the few people he could tolerate...