Word: olympian
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...slick performance, full of gaiety and verve and a fast-talking grace reminiscent of Noel Coward. Mr. Morse is admirable as the quarry of the love-chase, the baffled and laughed-at talker, but there is more to the character than the excitable little man he gives us. The "Olympian majesty" specified by Shaw is missing; Tanner's magnificent brashness becomes mere cheek. Mr. Morse can lay down doctrine with considerable brio, but his John Tanner never seems committed to his ideas with any great intensity of the "moral passion" he talks about. It becomes a matter of little significance...
...lasting roughly from 1000 B.C. to 600 A.D. Toynbee traces the course of Hellenism's bright star lucidly, a little offhandedly, treating it largely as an object lesson for the present. Hellenism's central characteristic was the worship of man-exemplified by the ludicrously human crew of Olympian divinities and, later, by a more sophisticated secular humanism. This man worship, which has thrilled so many historians of Greece, chills Toynbee (an Anglican with a yen for syncretism). To him, it is a form of idolatry that appeals to man when he has mastered nature...
...sleep, and play apart. What is worse, a cult of adoration has built up around the great hockey star or the speedy halfback. Boston newspapers follow their every move, urchins scuffle for their signatures outside the gates of Dillon, and sultry Hub temptresses sigh with desire at their Olympian exploits...
Perhaps it is unfair to send critics tickets for opening nights. Openings at times tend to seduce us from our Olympian objectivity. The atmosphere is tuxedoed and festive and charged with excitement, and everybody cheers and shouts and applauds like fury. Well, last night they had something to shout about. Yeomen of the Guard would be a delight on a rainy night in a plague year before an audience of psychopathic dope fiends. Under the conditions that prevail at Agassiz, it is an absolute, downright, unimpeachable, irreproachable, rip-roaring riot...
...medium of mediocrity, but there are still five or six wonderful hours a week. That's all I need. With more, I'd become a blithering idiot." Concluded Susskind, addressing the disgruntled Cadillacs: "You seem to be wallowing in self-abnegation ... As opposed to making Olympian comments, why don't you-the men with a creative mark to etch-do something about...