Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best, bland, and more often intrusive for its carelessness, its cliches and its poor attempts at being witty. For example, "Boswell was a veritable American Express card; Johnson could never have left home without it." Or, more seriously, and perhaps more typical of the sort of casual turn of phrase that irritatingly litters Mallon's text: when remarking on a sentence from the adolescent diaries of the German psychologist, Karen Horney, Mallon writes, "One can hear the girl turning into the doctor right at the comma...
...prose itself is rich and carefully crafted, and it includes some amazing turns of phrase which must be read in context to be fully appreciated. Along the way there are a series of (apercus) of varying profundity. Eberstadt is an accute observer of the intellectual and social snobbery which prevails among the wealthy young. Mocking the common assumption that to be sophisticated is to be blase, unflappable, Jem says, "It's not glamorous not to be shocked. It's autistic." (The pun on artistic should not be lost on those who have ever tried this route to social chic...
...Occasional Prose, fugitive pieces range from reportage to literary criticism to the comparative values of wood ash, manure and seaweed in the garden. All of the works are reminiscent of, in Stendhal's memorable phrase, "a mirror walking along a main road." McCarthy's reflections begin with a recollection of her colleague Philip Rahv, longtime editor of Partisan Review. Thousands of words have been spent discussing the unrepentant old radical; this obituary captures him in three sentences: "He never learned to swim . . . He would immerse his body in the alien element but declined or perhaps feared to move with...
...vaguely mock-ancient, not abrasive Disneyland replicas. As ever, Hollein succeeds in pleasing with the highly particular small space, the odd cutout corner or voluptuous semicircular marble stair. Monchengladbach has the virtuoso exuberance of a big, ambitious first novel, brimming with every story fragment and shimmery turn of phrase the author can muster...
...melancholy phrase on a dark night in February 1968, Johnson summed up his war that failed. "We're not going to surrender," he said grimly. Just a month later, he decided he had had enough and announced his decision not to seek re-election. So after all, it was the Alamo. Except in the end, Lyndon Johnson's war was taken away from...