Word: nice
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...False Witness" [Feb. 14]: it's nice to feel that our nation has at least three patriots, in Herbert Philbrick, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, whose anti-Communist testimony is consistently reliable...
...kismet, doubtless the theater would have invented one. For whatever its status as metaphysics, it makes a useful handmaiden for melodrama. And exploited, as in Tonight in Samarkand, with all the blare of circus music and color of circus life, it achieves for two acts a certain quality of nice old-fashioned excitement. The play goes in for few philosophic frills, merely uses fate as a plot gimmick. A blonde girl symbolizes death, but no more abstrusely than a headwaiter symbolizes dinner...
...Wayward Saint has the materials for a delicate satiric fantasy; in spots it boasts nice, imaginative touches and humorous lines, and in Irish Actor Liam Redmond it has an expertly lovable canon...
...Sylvia. "Why, certainly," replies Willis. "It will be a pleasure, honey." Yet just as Sylvia puts up with him, so in the end does the reader. For Author Marquand manages a highly skillful double-switch with the reader's emotions. Early in the book, he smoothly turns the nice youngster into a glossy horror; later on he turns the horror into a rather sad character who compels sympathy. Novelist Marquand's plot may sag at points, but the caricature of his hero is fascinating, down to the last page, when wise and forbearing Sylvia tucks in her husband...
...John Peyton Trimble irrepressibly convinced that "experimentation" is the first rule of behavior, "essential to the courage to be oneself." His politically gifted son rigidly practices a contrary rule: "Never bet against the house-don't be a sucker-be the house." As in his other books (The Nice American, The Center of the Stage), Novelist Sykes cleaves right to the secret core of his characters-ex-Communist literary snobs, envenomed small-town society queens, Point Four evangelists, coronary-conscious manufacturers. But this time he has also hacked a plot from political headlines, and so blunted his aptest insights...