Word: savantes
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...stays high on opium and waits for a call to action from the provisional wing of the I.R.A. Mum is Mayo, who has ties to the Provos, a callow sense of Realpolitik and a Flemish masterpiece that she stole from a London museum. The kiddies are Murf, an idiot savant at wiring up explosives, and his girl friend Brodie, a pert little simpleton who totes bombs to their destinations...
Before Bok, at least, if you had asked a Harvard savant about who ran the place, he would tell you the faculty did--they were, you see, this group of brilliant, quarrelsome, egomaniacal men, primarily interested in advancing knowledge, who somewhat incidentally kept Harvard going as well. It was an appealing theory because it implied that as long as there were brains here the place would run itself. Now, though, the theory has faded a little. Everybody knows the faculty members think they run the place--but the administrators really...
...hear a lot of this one this year--in this issue of the Crimson, for instance. One self-acclaimed Harvard savant used to say, "The thing about Harvard is that if you're cool, it's cool. It's only if you've got some flaw, some weak point. Harvard will find it, and bring it out." People are always talking about how intense it is here, how they've changed, how high school seems long ago. Maybe people are happy at Harvard but they're hardly ever
What a gag like this lacks in novelty Director Blake Edwards can make up for with the trim velocity of his timing, the precision engineering of each comic contretemps. Then there is Peter Sellers as Clouseau. This idiot-savant gumshoe is one of Sellers' best creations, a creature of impervious stupidity and unyielding, if ever tenuous, dignity. Clouseau can vacuum up the entire contents of a hotel room, drive trucks into a swimming pool, inundate his quarters with bubble bath, and still react with the mere suggestion of embarrassment, as if he had just sneezed a little too loudly...
...They were about heroes, not average men; and the world of stoic virtue and exemplary action that unfolds in them is far removed from the reality of the Revolution. The fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive. He rendered this savant, the discoverer of oxygen, in heroic terms, though muted by domesticity; like Homer or Dante, Lavoisier is seen with symbolic appurtenances (the magnificent still life of scientific instruments does duty for the bardic wreath and scroll), presided over by his wife as Muse. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined in the Terror, and the painting...