Word: portraits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...George Bernard Shaw of Michael Holroyd's biography, which takes the playwright up to age 42 in the twilight of the 19th century, hardly seems likely to become one of the most lionized men of the 20th century. Yet this portrait, a dozen years in the making, in the end enhances Shaw's achievements. In place of the glib rhetorician, Holroyd poignantly brings into view the shy, resentful, self-thwarting youth who created the persona of G.B.S. Ashamed of his scandalous and impecunious family, embarrassed by his own awkward ways with peers, employers and especially women, yearning for a position...
...master at choosing a few physical quirks which quickly sketch a whole range of characteristics. His best moments explore the extent of male folly. His characters are often driven by lust, a drive that they often do not understand or which threatens to overwhelm them. A bombastic portrait of a Married to the Mob type who has just eaten a huge meal is particularly on target. As he advises his nephew Vincent to fall in love, he reminisces about his own youth, when he was a "human hard-on" and "a dick with clothes on." "You don't get married...
...important caches of the letters are still embargoed until the next century. But his spiritual autobiography, the only sort that mattered to him, is displayed throughout his poems. The Waste Land, it is now clear, is not simply an impersonal, jazz-age jeremiad. It is also a nerve- racking portrait of Eliot's emotional disintegration during his 20s: his emigration, against his family's wishes, from the U.S. to England and, once there, his disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a vivacious but increasingly unstable partner whom Virginia Woolf once described as a "bag of ferrets" around Eliot's neck...
...Eliot' s centenary -- and epochal influence -- is celebrated not with a whimper but a bang. -- Ingmar Bergman' s self- portrait...
...until three decades later that it was identified as Ekron (peak population: 6,000). The American-Israeli excavation, now in its seventh season, is uncovering a wealth of material in a 50-acre area that is helping archaeologists piece together a far more accurate -- and flattering -- portrait of the ancient Philistines. Says Gitin: "When we started digging at Ekron, it was as though we were opening a time capsule...