Word: realisms
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...patina, however, has neither obscured nor answered the most troubling question about Reagan. Put starkly, that question is whether he is smart enough to be President. The U.S. has seldom demanded that its chief executive officers be intellectuals, of course. But clear-eyed realism, sensitive and discriminating judgment, a feel for power relationships, instinct born of at least a general knowledge of how the System works are all demanded in a President...
...specifics could be slow going. Yet it never lapses into dry exegesis. Nabokov keeps stepping back for a longer view of his subject from some surprising angle. Dickens, he insists, is anything but sentimental in his treatment of children in Bleak House. Madame Bovary, that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs...
...maverick with a cause: the whole philosophy of a new realism. The cause is more important than the individual. If it were just a matter of satisfying some personal ambition, I would surely have given up the fight a long time...
Moynihan believes that we may be groping our way back now. "Realism is making its way in," he says, but acknowledges that it has not yet produced a Government that can respond to crisis quickly and skillfully...
...edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body is enfolded by its own distances from the world, while planted solidly in a real bedroom. By the same token, the realism of the scene is also an appeal-though a subliminal one-to art history: Jo facing the August light of Truro recalls any number of quattrocento Annunciations...