Word: plebeians
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...Valk is a plebeian with little formal education. But he reads a lot, looks hard at the world and thinks fast. He also has a blonde French wife who provides Gallic insight and underdone foie de veau, modifying her husband's tendency toward Dutch stolidity. In short, Van der Valk is the perfect medium through which Freeling, himself a multilingual, self-educated, cultural nomad, can express his own sharp-eyed perceptions of life. While getting on with the crime, readers are treated to idioms in several languages and quotes from the likes of Horace and Kipling. They are also...
...heeled shoes and shoulder purses for men, it seemed impossible that the ladies would not strike back. Now they have: in the gilded salons of Manhattan, London and Paris, the flouncy belles of yesteryear are turning out in man-tailored jackets, fly-front trousers and-saddest of all-the plebeian cravat...
...Oxbridge playboy half of The Persuaders. His co-persuader is Danny Wilde, a new-rich high roller from The Bronx (Tony Curtis), and the two of them womanize and swashbuckle around the Cote d'Azur "in the name of justice." For all their jet-set airs, their plebeian repartee and stupefying plots make Roger and Tony emerge more like Batman and Robin in ascots. Catch the show fast lest the Nielsen ratings get there first...
Folding painted screens are an integral part of Japanese architectural thought: they occupy a shadow line between architecture and decoration. These delicate panels of rice paper stretched on lacquered frames, held together by paper or leather hinges, were the remote ancestors of today's plebeian room dividers and office partitions. Their name, byōbu, means "protection from wind." From the 7th century, when the first byōbu were introduced from China, the art of screen painting absorbed the best talents in Japan. Perhaps because, being in everyday domestic use, they were more liable to damage than scrolls...
...Elena picks up the relation between privileged performer and plebeian audience where the ending of French Can Can leaves it, namely in a state of joyous common participation in a social spectacle; it transforms this relation into one of sorrowful class distinction. The ending of Elena forces its high-born heroine to adopt the dominant mood of her whole social surrounding, but it denies her a role within it. The inner door-frame, which in early Renoir let privileged heroes pass into the free milieu of the street, here becomes a window that locks the aristocrats into their milieu...