Word: phlegm
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Grant was a strange blend of phlegm and flame. During the eerie Battle of the Wilderness, he spent the day receiving dispatches, issuing orders-and whittling on twigs. When the battle was over, while hundreds were still burning to death in a forest incinerated by gunfire (a dying Confederate cried over and over again: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), Grant decided he could do no more, went to bed and within minutes was sleeping like a baby. Catton gives another glimpse of this side of Grant's nature by comparing the way he and Sherman smoked cigars...
...parable. His Everyman numbly but stubbornly seeks an honorable-a human-way to survive the "endless round that shrinks a man to something less than the size and the meaning of flying ants." Relentlessly staging a Job-like trial-by-humiliation, Armah daubs "the man" with spit, phlegm and sweat. Rot and stink-the look and smell of corruption-rise up from every page. It is a classmate, Koomson, who perfumes all the putrefaction with the sweet smell of his success as a self-serving official of the new regime...
...Flanders village of Quiquendone is a study in slow motion. The burgomaster is "phlegm personified." Conversations are punctuated by extended periods of silence. It is a town, says one man, "where there has not been the shadow of a discussion for a century, where the cartmen do not swear, where the coachmen do not insult each other, where horses do not run away, where the dogs do not bite, where the cats do not scratch." For lovers to marry before they have courted languorously for ten years is a scandal...
Neighborhood Theater. To create a neighborhood theater was Joan Littlewood's ambition as far back as the early '30s. when she was a scholarship student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. With a working-class background, she was full of phlegm because "there were hunger marches outside, and inside were girls being taught this tennis-club stuff." After completing the course, she left London on foot to walk north to seek her career, collapsed after 112 miles in Burton-on-Trent. scrubbed out a pub to get fare to go on to Manchester. There...
...second scene of the Adams House Henry IV, a good-sized lump of flesh is discovered slouching on a bench, snoring. It is the snore of authority, rich with phlegm and idiosyncrasy, and within a few minutes after it dwindles into wakefulness there is no question that things will be all right. The lump of course is Sir John Falstaff, in the considerably-augmented person of Daniel Seltzer, and the effervescent Mr. Seltzer is engaged in one of the most amazing tours de force ever perpetrated upon the risibilities of the Harvard community. He shows us an entirely fabulous creature...