Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...held his own as an observer of public and private wastelands. But he has found a more authentic voice in fiction (True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue). His characters are barbed, cynical and funny. Their attitudes and remarks reveal gifts for malice, resentment and mordant sentimentality, which Dunne associates with his immigrant heritage. As he writes in Harp, a memoir that takes its title from the slang for a son or daughter of the Old Sod, "Nothing lifts the heart of the Irish caroler more than the small vice, the tiny lapse, the exposed vanity...
...idea of a summer institute for undergraduates that would promote the study of classical Western thought first arose over a year ago when Bennett was having dinner with Bloom. Bloom, a mordant critic of higher education and author of the best-selling The Closing of the American Mind, and Bennett agreed that it was time to find a new way to bring back more traditional curricula on college campuses...
Olmos was right on the wavelength of "El Pachuco," the strutting, posing, super-macho narrator and mordant conscience of the story. "I spoke in calo, street jive from the streets of East L.A. -- a mix of Spanish, English and Gypsy," he says. "They asked me if I could dance, and I hit a perfect set of splits, turning the brim of my hat as I came up." He got the part...
Andromache is a production of mordant humor, bitter irony and moral force -- if also of significant miscalculation and highly uneven acting. Some of the performers are tripped up by Eric Korn's half-arch, half-vernacular translation, in which vulgarity and clumsy colloquialism ("Is death the net result of all my love?") clash with the neoclassicism of the set and costumes. The plot is a sour inversion of the lovers' tangle in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Orestes (Kevin McNally), son of the murdered war hero Agamemnon, pursues his cousin Hermione (Penelope Wilton), daughter of Helen of Troy...
...state, he faced bleak prospects: the official campaign to discredit him had taken on undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed "The End of a Beautiful Era," a poignant elegy on past illusions with a mordant conclusion about the future: "For the innocent head there is nothing in store but an ax/ and the evergreen laurel." Last week the eerie prophecy in these lines was fulfilled. Joseph Brodsky, 47, involuntarily cut off from his homeland in 1972, was given the Nobel Prize for Literature...