Word: shaded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...awnings of sidewalk cafés from 60∧ a square yard to $25, café owners threatened to strike, coffee lovers raised a howl, and the Confederation of Commerce and Tourism dispatched an official delegation to the Finance Minister, a Christian Democrat. Result: the tax on shade was raised to only...
...book's core is a long, sober meditation in rhymed couplets by the late and highly respected poet John Shade...
Surrounding it is a dense, many-layered rind of preface, commentary and index, compiled by a scholarly ass named Charles Kinbote. This obtuse fellow imagines himself to have been a great friend of Shade's. Actually, as is absurdly and delightfully evident after a few pages, Kinbote knew the old poet for only a few months, and their friendship consisted of bare toleration on Shade's side...
Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin...
...begins to be clear that Kinbote hoped to get Shade to make an epic of Charles the Beloved's decline and fall...