Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...murals in churches-"Among all colors none is more suitable to temples than white; by reason that the purity of this color. . . is highly grateful to God." Of course, the preference was not God's but Palladio's. Why did he pre fer white? Because the protagonist in his Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, no less than in his villas, is light-the rich, fugitive, unstable light of the lagoon and the inland plain. Reflected from the creamy Istrian stone, absorbed by brick work and stucco, or washing solemnly across the pure vaults and domes...
...Brown, the protagonist of Mark Harris' new novel, is a man who cannot even bring himself to exterminate a neighbor's annoying dog. Yet his mind is a charnel house of potential victims, executed because he thinks nearly everyone around him helped send his mistress's son to death in Viet Nam. Incurably infected by the anger and violence of the past decade, Brown fires off anonymous and threatening letters to presidents, neighbors, even chance acquaintances who displease...
Irwin Shaw's recent characters seem to come in three possible shapes: flat, angular or round. They range from the looking" to "sharp-faced, the merely balding, "round, mahog insignificant-any-tanned [and] smiling." Somewhere in between, you will find Jesse Craig, the 48-year-old protagonist of Shaw's latest bestselling novel. Craig's last two films bombed for $8,000,000; his estranged wife has grown accustomed to his checkbook; his mistress may be getting bored with his body. So Craig does the only logical thing: he flees to the Cannes Film Festival to mend...
...there is any hope at all for Twin Oaks, and any redeeming feature of its concept, it is to be found in the basic good faith of its members (sometimes a naivete), which often makes for a certain easy trust, sympathy, nay, love. But then again, as the protagonist admits in Walden Two, "What is love, except another name for the use of positive reinforcement...
...1880s, the Fenian movement boldly bombed the House of Commons. In 1903 the Irish waged another bombing campaign, and again, in 1939, they went on a 15-month spree of dynamiting elegant shops, theaters, mailboxes and railway cloakrooms. Joseph Conrad's protagonist in The Secret Agent schemed to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, just as the hero of a novel recently published in London, The Patriot Game, plans to blast the headquarters of the British secret service...