Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Librettist Mitchell, 46, is known as an anti-elitist who believes art should be "useful" to a broad public. Schat, 44, a political radical, was one of the collaborators on the 1969 Dutch opera Reconstruction, a political fantasia on Don Giovanni in which the Don represented imperialism and the Commendatore turned out to be Che Guevara. Thus it comes as no surprise that Houdini is suffused with a romantic-and at times sentimental-populism. In the final scene, Houdini appears from beyond the grave with the message that "there is no heaven but the people/ Let the people...
...loss of psychological depth. Houdini offered almost no plot, almost no human interplay. Throughout the evening, a large portrait of the magician stared out at the performers from the ear of the stage, as if challenging them to account for his mysterious driven nature. The tricks, the career, the public appropriation of him as a hero were all here. But the man himself? Once again, he escaped. - Christopher Porterfield
...think of Liz Taylor, especially if the thinker happens to have been twelve when she was twelve, all brave and radiant in National Velvet. (Teddy Kennedy was twelve then, and so was John Updike, but they had not wandered into the witch's house, were not on public view.) Some of the present class of very young actresses will become fat, will be many times divorced, will forever erase the lying promise of incredible early beauty. Some of these pretty children will do better, some worse, but that is for later, for the unimaginably distant future, for October. Just...
...wrote, that Gaudy Night, her penultimate detective work, and The Zeal of Thy House, her first religious drama, were "variations upon a hymn to the Master Maker." During her later years, religion became increasingly important in her life. Hone follows Sayers as, dressed in mannish suits, she made her public rounds of BBC talks and academic lectures. But her private life remains largely a mystery-as does Hone's reason for calling this a "literary biography," since it fails to analyze the books or the career. Instead, he splices together bits of Sayers' life and pieces...
Wryness was his real profession; by the 1950s, when he was editing Punch, it was clear that Muggeridge was one of the saltiest essayists of his time. He went public on English television, as a panelist of dependable perversity. Then he surprised his audience with a book called Jesus Rediscovered (1969), and it became known that-contrariness to the contrary-he was a practicing Christian...