Word: passionlessness
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...Frying Pan is of a different sort. Catholic priest and the wife of his best friend quite suddenly find that they are in love with each other. Here is where a naturalist would lead his characters into the widest fights of criticism: the unfortunate, quite passionless husband would be painted in a pitiless, scoffing manner, and certainly the love scenes between priest and wife could be ignored in all their sordid and demented glory. But O'Connor merely comments, "He (the husband) as he really was, a man at war with his animal nature, longing for some high, solitary existence...
...persuasions" to sign a phony confession of spying for the British and Americans. He refused, and then began four years of prison camps in Siberia and Turkestan. His brief descriptions of Lubianka, the slave camps and the tortures that were devised to break him are set down in the passionless reporting of a recorder who has known terror so well that it has become conventional...
...fighting of Wellington's army in Spain. His account of the battle of Waterloo is a model of brevity, exact and graphic. But it is old England itself which most excites Bryant, its landed wealth, its civilization, its regard for personal liberty, its native good sense. No mere passionless chronicler, Historian Bryant knows what he likes and doesn't like. "True aristocracy, after true religion," he writes, "is the greatest blessing a nation can enjoy." And the older England had enjoyed that blessing, along with several lesser ones-including the best diet in the world...
...rest, the production merits respect for its determination to be serious rather than showy. Unfortunately, much of it seems commonplace, passionless, unbreathed upon. King Lear contains half a dozen roles stamped with Shakespeare's maturest genius. But the production is a tangle of acting styles-an Edmund sinuous as an Oriental dancer, a Goneril straight out of melodrama; perhaps only Martin Gabel's blunt, forthright Kent keeps its outline. Round the play's great lonely poetic peaks roar the cold winds of human evil and malign fate, the bleak message that...
...joined and brightly told study of middle-aged delusional jealousy. Henry Bishop yearned for the days when people gently chased butterflies with nets; by contrast, he found modern life crude and vulgar. Until Diver's appearance, his 20 years of marriage with Madge had been plain, placid and passionless. Diver was all energy and heartiness. To Madge's amusement, he thrust trick gadgets at Henry-a golden dog whose eyes lit up, a dinner plate that leaped up convulsively...