Word: miranda
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...enormous rooms. But her characters are no more untrue to life for this than Oedipus would be for driving around in an automobile instead of a chariot. In Mother & Son, middle-aged Rosebery is in just the same fix as Oedipus: he cannot escape from life with mother. Aged Miranda is seeking to hire a companion because she thinks it is time for her elderly son to stop following her around. But the Fates know that neither mother nor son has any intention of separating. For 20-odd years, for example, Rosebery has let his mother sweeten his tea with...
Talking Is Real. Fate soon intervenes and shows them. The day comes when Miranda cannot put off telling her passive husband that the doctors have told her she will soon die. On hearing this secret, he is so bowled over that he splutters out an awful one of his own: the three children upstairs are not his dead brother's; they are his own, by a former mistress...
...hearing this, Miranda drops dead-and the slaves are suddenly free. Or rather, they have that illusion, for Author Compton-Burnett devotes the rest of Mother & Son to hammering home a vital truth: those who consent to live under tyranny can never be released from it, not even by the death of the tyrant. The bereaved men make desperate proposals of marriage; eager spinsters hurry to accept them; but it is no use. By the last page, everything is just as Miranda would want it: both her men have proved unmarriageable, bound by force of habit and inclination...
...Argentina's Juan Miranda lived up to his own boasts, outsprinted Wes Santee in the stretch of the 1500-meter run, set a games record...
...received students after taking his honorary degree, greeting each and all with "'I wish you all much happiness,' 'Gentlemen, I heartily wish you success in life,' and so on, constantly varying the phrase, which was always full of feeling." Visitors from abroad were entertained there as well: Francisco de Miranda from South America, "martyr to the cause of which Bolivar was the hero," finished his tour of Harvard in the Wadsworth dining room, the guest of President Willard whom he found "lean, austere, and of an insufferable circumspection...