Word: merlin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...well-known actors, Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, pose deeper problems, and offer more radical solutions. Of Morgana, mistress of mandrake and sulfur, Mirren makes an armored, camp enchantress. Swathed in purple veils and seaweed capes, intoning Merlin's dread spells as if they contained the dirtiest and most sacred words in any world, incarcerating the wizard in a cocoon of cotton candy as she proclaims victory over her mentor, Mirren convinces that she could charm a kingdom-or a film- with her perfidy...
...performance seems a model of restraint next to Williamson's Merlin. The voice sweeps from wail to whisper, from adenoidal giggle to basso preposteroso growl - often in the same sentence. It is a daring display, and an exhilarating one. Merlin is, after all, a man out of time: "Our days are numbered," he declaims to Morgana...
Last week something new had been added. Fresh spray-painted signs on the walls declared: KEEP VINCENNES IN VINCENNES and NO TO DISMANTLING OUR ZOO. The latest watchwords were responses to the sudden resignation of Vincennes' beleaguered president, Pierre Merlin, 42, and the renewed determination of the French government to cut down the university's size by moving it to the working-class Paris suburb of Saint-Denis...
...against 45.5% in the U.S.), but so far, except at Vincennes, France has had little diploma devaluation. The doings at Vincennes stirred conservative ire, and the French government made political capital by announcing that it would move the Vincennes campus this June. Resistance came from students and Vincennes President Merlin, who has struggled long and manfully against the school's drug problems and the politicization of the campus...
Last week, the day after students held him prisoner in his office for 13 hours for charging six foreign students with using false identity papers, President Merlin abruptly resigned. It was not the indignity, he explained. It was the fact that "a majority of the students had failed to react against ultraleftists who are destroying Vincennes." With his departure, the move to Saint-Denis seems inevitable...