Word: prolix
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Notions of this sort were popular in Britain a decade ago. As to the present British view of America, Mrs. Cooper describes it as follows: "American scholarship is condemned as prolix, overearnest and trivial. The only genuine art form is jazz, produced by an oppressed minority. Most Americans are bores; nice people, quite often, but boring nonetheless. A first degree from an American university is worthless; an American Ph.D. degree in any nonscientific subject is laughable...
Capable of Honor is the third book in a tetralogy that Drury launched with his successful, widely read Advise and Consent. It lacks the spellbinding novelty of that first book. It is laden with passages that are even more clumsy and prolix than those in A Shade of Difference, the second in the series. But Drury succeeds again simply by cramming his book with intricately spun accounts of domestic skulduggery, international chicanery, congressional conniving, and White House squeeze plays-all of which spell bestsellerdom. What's more, old Senate Reporter Drury (who used to work for the New York...
...short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comédie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt to his mother, wife, sister, mistress, gardener and the village constable in Ville-d'Avray. Now the world stands heavily in Balzac's debt...
...rebels and imagining he is out of the ruck and into the luck. Sillitoe was always a careless writer, and now that he is crassly cashing in, he is grossly sprawling out. He is inaccurate: "They were attracted like two magnets in a field of iron filings." He is prolix: "Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face. Keith reacted, fist bursting, a whalehead driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness." He is even ungrammatical...
...carefully written group scenes, the distillations of a life that could provide several plays. One just doesn't listen to Quentin's speeches, and his generalized guilt becomes real only in what is now the largest of dramatic commonplaces, the mass murders of Nazi Germany. Quentin's prolix introspection provides only relaxation before the next rise of tension, the scenes that are the play's reality. As such, After the Fall is a dramatist's tour de force, but not a live play...