Word: mull
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pinter makes arresting drama out of platitudes. His characters are listless nobodies who prattle witlessly about the weather, the neighbors, about eating and sleeping. Cooped up in wretched little rooms, they fondle material possessions and mull over memories like savages, so drugged by habit that paltry incidents pass for news. They soak up mundane sensory experience through a screen of simple-minded, petulant prejudices...
...relentless pursuit of the future. He is Charles Bates Thornton, 50, the chairman of California-based Litton Industries-and he was busy on horseback at the most important facet of his job: thinking. When "Tex" (he came from a small Texas town) Thornton has a problem to mull over, he finds that he does his best thinking on a solitary 30-or 40-mile ride through the mountains, where he can "look at the world down there, and the world beyond. It is my way of getting away from it all, getting out where I can clear my head...
...overwhelmed by guilt that they cannot recall the actual crimes that landed them in prison. They cannot distinguish between the people they felt like murdering and those they actually did murder; they feel as guilty for their thoughts as for their deeds. In brooding conversations in their cell, they mull over the infinite possibilities of their guilt in the neorealist manner made familiar by Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad...
...Postholing." Nonetheless, E.S.I.'s innovators cannot help improving the dead-fact history taught in so many U.S. schools, teaching that ignores the new insights of anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology. Last summer, E.S.I, scholars in such fields met to mull ideas that boil down to one main approach: use all the new scholarly tools for probing deeply ("postholing") into one specific situation, rather than skimming over great hunks of history at a time. As M.I.T. Historian Elting Morison, editor of Theodore Roosevelt's letters and a key E.S.I. scholar, put it: "It may be that a student can learn...
...well; asked if he would not start if he saw a ghost, he answered, "I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost." But if the tour aroused Johnson's antic side, it aroused his antiquarian side even more. On the islands - Raasay and Skye and Mull - there were still feudal forms of life, clans and chieftains, Macdonalds and MacLeods and Macleans. There were ruins and grottoes, homely customs, and high ritualized hospitality. Johnson per ambulated, gazed and pontificated. He could also be playful as well as sententious. When a young bride sat on his knee...