Word: plumb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...20th century has long been fascinated by what it considers one of the odder aberrations of the 19th: Victorian morality. British Historian J.H. Plumb has aptly described "the Victorian's schizophrenic attitude-the conspiracy of silence, the excessive modesty that made the sight of a female ankle wildly erotic, contrasted with the baby prostitutes in the Strand." American Scholar Steven Marcus, in his study The Other Victorians, wrote of "a world part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination and part madhouse." Last week London was atwitter over not one but two sex scandals that came to light when some documents...
...problems that trouble the U.S. today are complex and interrelated in unexpected ways. To plumb and analyze them, TIME Soundings will report quarterly on the mood, temper and outlook of Americans. Soundings consists of a series of political and social indicators that were developed for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc. The report differs from more traditional opinion polls in two respects: 1) Soundings not only measures shifts in public opinion but also tries to monitor the underlying trends that produce sea changes in public attitudes, and 2) the indicators are based on an amalgam of responses to hundreds...
...bloke onstage. Currently starring in Scapino (TIME, June 3), he is the spring season's biggest sensation - over, under, beside, beneath, across, atop and flat on his back upon the Broadway stage. Tall and lanky, he seems endowed with a flamingo's limbs - concave knees; one-legged, plumb-line balance; flapping, winglike arms. Playing the duplicitous Neapolitan servant Scapino involves at least as much acrobatics as acting. At one point he keels over from the edge of a 10-ft. platform, grabs onto a hanging rope just before his feet leave the edge, and continues his dialogue suspended...
...flaw in Tarnopol is that as a book boy, he has "fallen in love with those complicated fictions of moral anguish" he keeps reading about. The depths of tragedy-that, Tarnopol thinks, is what an artist and a man must plumb. He yearns romantically to be a golden loser as well as a golden winner. Furthermore, he has a notion that one must prove one's manhood, not on the battlefields of war (like old-style machismo novelists) but in the combat zones of love. Nor is he fantasizing sexual conquest. For, paradoxically, what woman represents to Tarnopol...
...circumstances, it would strain credulity; with Molly played by dull, spunkless Blythe Danner, its strength is incomprehensible. Although she is a sweet enough young thing, even in the early going she suggests no mysterious depths of feeling, intelligence or sexuality that would require more than 40 minutes to plumb. As she ages-and life plays its usual mean tricks on the three of them-she seems a pleasant, easy kind of woman but not the focal point around which three lives are built...