Word: motif
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...struggles have been her own, and their realism prevented resolution. Walls don't open up in real life, and women do not burst through into other world's. Africa, Lessing's nemesis, is only mentioned in passing in Memoirs, where in her previous work it has been a recurring motif. Political awareness is here, but in a more subile form, for, as she says government is an anachronism in a world of anarchy. "The last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government we wanted only to forget it." The New society must...
...social foible was mean and exact; his sense of ideas almost nonexistent. He had (and still has) one obsessive theme: the unease of the arrived white rich, the devices by which they assuage guilt, and the hustles wrought on them from below. That was the motif of his last book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). It also supplies the comedy of manners for his new one, The Painted Word, which appeared in Harper's April issue and has now been published in hard cover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book was meant...
...skit without worrying much about continuity. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, by contrast, has a single unified story line about a deadpan King Arthur searching for, well, the Holy Grail. Instead of being simply a background for a series of more or less independent routines, the Arthurian motif strangles the jokes...
...alumnus of Miles Davis and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Cobham evolved from a progressive rhythm-and-blues drummer to a deft jazz writer-arranger. His music, often danceable, reflects Caribbean and Latin American rhythmic and tonal influences. Solarization, a 10½-minute elaboration of a five-note motif, is sometimes ruminative, but at other times radiates sizzling sensuality...
...patch of spiky hair like hedgehog quills. To a degree few other painters can rival, Bacon convinces you that every stroke and drip counts, that they carry a weight of ethical decision, so that representation is not a matter of filling-in but rather a continual reinvention of the motif. "I use everything from the brushes that sweep the floor to rags. I use everything to remake the images. I am not trying at all to illustrate life." Bacon wants - and generally manages to put - the drama in the paint, not in the narrative. In fact, the best triptychs...