Word: mocks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After centuries as the playing field of England's budding politicians, Oxford University understandably plays its own games of academic politics in mock-heroic earnest. Harold Macmillan twice won the prime-ministership by wider margins than his 1960 squeak into Oxford's chancellorship. "There's nothing most dons [professors] like better than a good bitchy election," observed the Sunday Times. Last week the bitchiest one in years had Oxford-and the nation -twittering as the port was passed...
...them that he was trying to lift $500,000 stashed in a wall safe. The cops persuade themselves that ill-gotten gains might as well line the pockets of two hard-working law officers, and conspire to do some Cotten-pickin' after hours. Their moonlighting ends in a mock-Shakespearean finale. While Montalban overacts outrageously, Ford fires bullets along with a somewhat more lethal barrage of words, words, words. "It isn't the money," intones Ford. "It never is. It's people. The things they want, and the things they...
Redeeming touches of grace are provided by Choreographer-Director Bob Fosse. His diamond-bright "Rich Man's Frug" is artfully precise mock-mimicry of the discotheque set. Fosse's dances always say something about the society that breeds them, and his jazz-oriented "Rhythm of Life" church number is a wry comment on religious hipsteria. The score is useful rather than enchanting, but one song, There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This, threatens to become the mood music of everyone who ever hated...
...opening line of the novel. The initials of Ennis' corps, A.V.C., are an acronym of the opening lines of the Aeneid-Arma virumque cano. Ennis is intended to be seen as Aeneas, founder of the Roman race after the fall of Troy. The mock heroics are well sustained, though Burgess now modestly sees the Virgilian parallel as a "tyro's method of giving his story a backbone," as Joyce used the Odyssey to underpin Ulysses. But Burgess is not Virgil any more than Joyce was Homer. His hero loses nothing by being a comic rather than a classic...
...raids were brilliantly planned, precisely executed (murmured one resident Englishman: "Sandhurst training certainly leaves its mark"). In the dusty northern capital of Kaduna, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, 29, had been holding night maneuvers for six straight weeks, once even led his troops through a mock invasion of the sprawling white palace of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (Emir) of Sokoto, religious leader of 12.5 million Nigerian Moslems, boss of the nation's ruling political party, and the real power behind the Balewa government. So accustomed had the city become to the sound of night gunfire during the maneuvers that...