Word: minotaure
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...night listening to the subdued roar of the ocean. This latter remark had reference to the reputation Professor Greg had had as a controversialist. Many years earlier a local reviewer, after interviewing him on the eve of the publication of one of his books, had called him a minotaur who, with his book finished, was wearing his plumed pen gracefully behind his ear. This was journalistic excess, but it was true that Professor Greg had been a formidable antagonist. He was a gentleman, but where fact or a logical inference was concerned, he insisted on the exact truth...
...kind of prodigal son's return. But when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow of a hope that he may "even come to find life...
...city draped in black. He is told that the city must send a human tribute of seven young men and seven maidens to Crete, where they are to be put into a maze called the labyrinth and devoured by a fearsome creature, half-man, half-bull, called the Minotaur. Either by lot or insistence, Theseus becomes one of the seven youths and sets sail for Crete. There he wins the love of Ariadne, a Cretan princess, who gives him a magic sword with which to kill the Minotaur and a spool of cord with which to thread his way back...
...whole myth, with all its subplots, is a good deal more labyrinthine than that, and Author Renault threads her way as skillfully through it as Theseus did through the Minotaur's cave. Much of it is a sheer adventure yarn, full of javelin-play, wrestling, bull dancing (the Cretan version of bullfighting) and those gory sudden deaths and bloody double dealings to which the ancient Greeks were so prone that they probably invented the serene idea of the "golden mean" as an antidote...
...majestic bull she sees as lunar, the great progenitor who nonetheless partakes of the dark unconscious and "the lower material aspects ... to be sacrificed, conquered, outgrown ... so that the positive, creative energies may be released." The reason Theseus had to search out and slay the half-bull, half-human Minotaur in the labyrinth, she suggests, is that the beast represents the "misused powers of the 'bull...