Word: satirists
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...idea for Noises occurred to Frayn, 50, a well-known British farceur and satirist, one night in 1970 as he stood in the wings of a London theater watching a performance of a quick-change, arms-flapping farce he had written for Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers. "It was funnier from behind than in front," recalls Frayn, "and I thought, 'One day I must write a farce from behind...
...Vaticana bibis, bibis venenum," wrote the Roman satirist Martial in the 1st century: "Drink Vatican and you drink poison." Martial was writing of the wine produced in the neighborhood, which at the time was more famous as the site of the Vatican Circus, where Nero threw Christians to the lions after the great fire that swept Rome in A.D. 64. On such engaging historical notes opens The Vatican (Abrams; 398 pages; $60), a book that will do much to fill in the fragmentary picture that even dedicated travelers take away from this tiny (108 acres) yet labyrinthine city-state. This...
...chameleon. As soon as he started writing the music to go behind his own words. Sondheim began varying the roles he could play--sliding a melody off key or twisiting a double-entendre into mid-line, he was the vitriolic social critic in Sweenes Todd, the light satirist in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, the gentle troubadour in A Little Night Music; he was blandly anthologized as cultural phenomenon in Side by Side by Sondheim. Sondheim's tools are unquestionably the right ones: a versatile versifier can be anyone...
...premier satirist draws a sharp bead on lotus land...
...literary wars. Graves' targets were not insignificant. Vachel Lindsay: "jazz Blake, St. Francis of Assisi playing the saxophone at the Firemen's Ball." Ezra Pound: bad rhythms and "a wet handshake." Dylan Thomas: "a Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills." T.S. Eliot: "a marvelous satirist with a true poetic sense who had sold out to institutionalized religion...