Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like Eliot's Anyman, Charles Clé, at 61, began to have mordant thoughts about Félicie Crippa, who had been his mistress for 13 years. A soap and perfume salesman, Clé lived with Félicie in a cozy, two-room Paris apartment just down the street from Père-Lachaise Cemetery. He was a quiet man, always neatly dressed, always polite to his neighbors. Félicie was a short, plump, sad-eyed widow with bobbed greying hair. Eleven months ago she disappeared. Clé explained, "Félicie has gone to Italy. Life...
...very funny.") With an Ernie Kovackian flair for electronic jabberwocky and oddball gimmicks, he throws in some wild Italian movies or stages a midget-car race on the studio floor. For the most part, though, Paar just talks with his guests, bringing to the wee hours a sometimes mordant humor and off-color japery that smack of the old radio days when Bob Hope used to get cut off the air, e.g., "I went to the ballet last night. After all, we can't all be Marlboro...
Kaganovich introduced his protege to the top Kremlin big shots, and Khrushchev, who had wit and a fund of droll peasant sayings, and could laugh with his hands on his hips at the boss's mordant quips, was soon a regular visitor at the dacha Stalin kept for his fun-loving consort Roza Kaganovich, Lazar's sister. Khrushchev was a good deal more useful to Stalin than many of his Kremlin dummies. Twice Stalin sent him into the Ukraine to deal with troublesome peasants and bourgeois nationalists. Nikita, dressed in a Ukrainian shirt and cloth cap, deported scores...
...late in a hard evening, begins to take on a reverberating quality, as if her mouth were full of saliva. But the special quality of the Callas voice is not tone. It is the extraordinary ability to carry, as can no other, the inflections and nuances of emotion, from mordant intensity to hushed delicacy. Callas' singing always seems to have a surprise in reserve. With the apparently infinite variety of her vocal inflections, she can keep the listener's ear constantly on edge for a twist of an emotional phrase, constantly delighted by a new and unexpected flick...
...Author Pierre Gascar whose Beasts and Men was published as two separate books in France, one of which (Les Betes) unprecedentedly won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix des Critiques awards in 1953. Very much in the Kafka tradition, Author Gascar has put together in these short stories as mordant and bone-chilling a set of circumstances as modern literature has had to offer since Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, a tale of a timid salesman who woke one morning to find himself in the monstrous shape of a gigantic cockroach...