Word: shrills
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like ghosts haunting the attic of their past, the 52 American hostages continue to provoke shrill quarrels among their Iranian tormentors. Last week the circumstances of their negotiated release grew into the focal issue of the country's internal political struggle. Each of the opposing positions was riddled with Persian irony and paradox...
Lily Tomlin aspires to Chaplinesque heights of comic intuition and craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
...night. People left a gambling club near Hyde Park Corner, young men in evening dress shouting and laughing, girls laughing also, all of them tumbling into taxis, going on to somewhere else. For a moment Francis hated them. He stopped in his walk, indulging his dislike, listening to the shrill voices, the late-night cries of people determinedly having a good time. He wouldn't have cared if all of them had been shot down dead, if gunmen had appeared from the May fair doorways and opened fire in the orange street light...
...some of the liberals in our country would have us believe that "gee, if you say anything nasty about them, you won't get anything done." The Iranians don't play by those rules. We forget that the rhetoric of the Iranian leaders has been much more shrill. They have made vicious personal attacks on Jimmy Carter. They say plenty of nasty things about the U.S. and expect to get something done. So I don't worry about that. I think there's something refreshing about what Reagan said...
...simple to the point of transparency--becomes so cluttered as to be almost impenetrable. The rest of his performance is sloppy but sometimes affecting. The first night I saw the show McCue hit some surprising notes of anguish in the third act, but on the second the scene was shrill and unfelt...