Word: provocateur
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...difficult craft. It is also a chance for the playwright to mouth off and strike a number of disparate poses: the poker-playing resident of Vermont, the city boy who likes London tea shops, the gunner who belongs to both the N.R.A. and the A.C.L.U. and the provocateur who holds that women have no instinct for compromise and negotiation. Ranging widely, Mamet allows that "I am, by nature and profession, a browser." With the expanded confidence that comes with success and fame, he ambles in where Broadway and Hollywood angels fear to tread. It is fun to watch him keep...
...Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe...
Rushdie, meanwhile, has all the controversy, and attendant celebrity, he has often seemed to crave -- yet with a cruel vengeance. For years Rushdie has been one of Britain's most vocal polemicists, an agent provocateur who has delighted in mixing it up -- even if "it" means politics and literature. His first great novel, Midnight's Children, about India, was successfully challenged by the Prime Minister of India; his second, Shame, about Pakistan, was banned in Pakistan; now the last in his unofficial trilogy, about both India and England, has been banned in India and burned in England...
...quick to disavow the use of violent tactics. Says Julie Lewin of the Fund for Animals: "Violence toward people does not help animals." Some animal-rights proponents contend that Trutt's aborted bomb attack is so damaging to their cause that it may have been instigated by an agent provocateur. Police say they believe the bomb she planted was too sophisticated for her to have made by herself. As the FBI joined the investigation last week, Trutt professed to have no knowledge of explosives...
...fresh out of jail, having served 14 days for throwing a tear-gas canister back at Israeli soldiers. "The army is the provocation," he said. "The fact that they come into our camp is enough so that the shabab react by throwing stones." Osama admitted to being a provocateur. "Since he was a kid, he has belonged to the profession of stone thrower," said his friend Tarek Ali, 18, with some reverence...