Word: prim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Down There on a Visit is the best work this prim, prickly near mystic has done in years. Like all of Isherwood's books, it is coyly set in the form of autobiography-but-not-really; its narrator, as usual, is a ventriloquist's dummy named Christopher Isherwood whose surface sometimes seems faintly warm. Characteristically, there is too little fiction for a novel, too little truth for autobiography. Yet in his cagey, canny way, the author has written an engaging work of self-revelation...
...Francis Xavier. More prosaically, his father was a salesman for International Shoe Co. "C.C." (for Cornelius Coffin) Williams was a gruff, aggressive man with a booming voice who was happiest, says Tennessee, "playing poker with men and drinking." His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was petite, vivacious, genteel and prim; she nourished rather illusory memories of a grand and gracious Southern past, of going to dances in Natchez and Vicksburg "on those big, beautiful plantations...
...word in Paris, wrote the New York Herald Tribune's smart Eugenia Sheppard. was "sex." The prim Times sidestepped and called it "femininity." Last week, as the high-fashion houses of Paris put on display their latest notions of feminine architecture, it was clear that bosoms, knees, waists and hips were back. With that psychic unanimity that seems to animate the Paris fashion world, just about every big designer apparently had decided that the days of loose-fitting, shape-hiding dresses are gone...
...each person has withdrawn into a world of his own until the whole scene seems suffocated in silence. Her Kleptomaniac, which could so easily have turned out to be mere sentimentality, was inspired by something that happened when she was working years before in Woolworth's. A prim old lady was caught one day stealing a tiny bottle of cheap perfume. What Painter Gikow put on canvas after so many years was the look of sudden terror and humiliation on the face of a human being whose whole world has just crumbled...
Whatever became of this unpleasant Mr. Eliot, whose brow was ever so grim, and whose mouth was ever so prim, the present Mr. Eliot is a mellow, gracefully old and skeptical man, who was perfectly relaxed before his Boston College audience Monday night...