Word: peculiarities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...similar problem arises over the character of James, played genially by Jerome Kilty. James sounds only one note, however solidly, for the first three acts of the play--miserly, grumpy, critical, nationalistic in that way peculiar to formerly poor Irish-Americans. Real character development for James comes only in the fourth act, in a monologue in which he admits to Edmund the mistakes that ruined his career. Unfortunately, he then promptly leaves the stage, so that any readjustment of our understanding of his character must come retrospectively, reconsidering his earlier actions with this new information. The effect is poignant...
...last of them, his unfinished The Large Bathers, 1906, one sees the characteristics that have always rendered these peculiar arcadian scenes difficult to love even as they compel admiration and even a certain awe. This group of 14 stock nudes gathered around what must have been a picnic basket is as resolutely antisensuous as an assembly of naked women could possibly be. Some of them look like seals stranded on rocks. Others are lumpish giantesses. None were painted from actual models because, as his friend the painter Emile Bernard recalled, "he was the slave of an extreme sense of decorum...
...course of the past decade, the city has lived through three different epochs. First, that of perestroika and glasnost. At that time, in the second half of the 1980s, Moscow was transformed into a huge debating club, into a unique, peculiar Hyde Park. For the first time, there was freedom of speech. One could finally talk, express opinions. And one could write the truth. Dozens of newspapers and periodicals appeared; the print runs of even exclusively literary monthlies were in the millions. People bought these things, read them, collected them. Today in the cramped, cluttered apartments of intellectuals, against walls...
...fruitful collaboration with the regime is especially peculiar because Ehrenburg was an early and vocal anti-Bolshevik. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Kiev in 1891, he joined the Party in his teens but later quit in disgust at its intolerance and inability to understand art. Instead he lived as a Bohemian in Paris, making friends with Diego Rivera and Picasso. Even the Revolution didn't win him over to Communism; he returned to Russia in 1918, only to leave again three years later and write his first novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples...
...FUNNY PECULIAR...