Word: mortality
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MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, by Antonia Fraser. A rich, billowing biography of a pretty queen who, by casting herself as a religious martyr, has upstaged her mortal enemy, Queen Elizabeth I, in the imagination of posterity...
...this goes not only for the gentleman at the Ticket Office. I'm also talking about some of the ladies at our dining rooms who stand in mortal terror lest Bumble the Beadle see them giving us more than our ration of roast-beef...
Except in art and conversation, blandness is not a mortal sin; and even in politics, charisma is not always a virtue. Nkrumah and Sukarno stirred the blood of their countrymen, but they very nearly ruined their countries. Two of the most persuasive leaders of the 20th century were also two of its greatest monsters-Hitler and Mussolini. Particularly in advanced nations, the leader who governs by emotion and style is apt to be regarded as a dangerous indulgence, one that people with stable institutions should not hanker...
...York City Opera's production reflected the music in a swirling fantasy of galaxies, bursting stars and mythic clouds. If the production dragged, it is partly because Boito's talent for invoking the superhuman exceeded his skill at projecting the merely mortal...
...alas, as if they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate-or of professional gain-naturally detest and fear a creative man of letters like Ezra Pound, to whom poetry was a passion in which the soul was engaged in mortal questions of great consequence. Sir Edmund Gosse, for instance, a pompous Edwardian booktaster of great influence and reputation, once referred to Pound as "that preposterous American filibuster and Provençal charlatan." Gosse's dislikes were cordially returned. The young Evelyn Waugh saw Gosse as an "ill-natured habitue...