Word: pasts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...noble pretensions, was neither famous nor accomplished, except at the art of running up unpaid bills, and even that skill deserted him at the end. To Geoffrey and his younger brother Toby, their father's life was a matter of putting on heirs, of inventing a past that never was and promising a future that could never be. Endless rascality ultimately becomes tedious and irksome; all the world loves a confidence man until it discovers its wallet is missing. Yet Wolff's account of this misspent life is absorbing throughout. It is not just the story...
...quest begins with a shock. Upon hearing of his father's death, Wolff blurts out "Thank God." Feeling both self-righteous and ashamed, he decides to plow back into the past, trying to find the man who both made and ruined large swatches of his son's life. A cousin stares at him and says, "He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That's all he ever was." Wolff decides that the man he once adored must have been more than that...
...THINGS PAST by Malcolm Muggeridge Edited by Ian A. Hunter Morrow; 252pages...
...Things Past is Muggeridge in a strange new vein, neither very comic nor very Christian, if Christianity is assumed to include a measure of charity toward one's fellow man. The collection is arranged to show the development of Muggeridge's attitudes over time, and if it establishes that his religious beliefs are longstanding ones, it also shows that the author's store of hope for this imperfect world was exhausted by his disillusionment in Moscow...
...with Christ, to be realized in an afterlife. A reader whose mind does not run to mysticism is not likely to be enlightened by the author's remarks on the subject. But the reader can see what Muggeridge has excluded by turning his face from the world. Things Past is shot through with melancholy, the lashing-out of a wounded man, a Christian who has forgotten how to play God's fool and a humorist who has misplaced the gift of laughter. - John Skow