Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Blessings in Disguise is Sir Alec's title, but the blessings in this all- too-short autobiography (Knopf; $17.95) wear no masks. Along with an engaging picture of Guinness himself, there are candid and almost always hilarious portraits of some of those he has met along the way to his threescore and eleven: George Bernard Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie, Edith Evans, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and even Ernie Kovacs, who, he says, was "just about the funniest man I have ever...
...afternoon during the filming of Our Man in Havana, in which Kovacs played a corrupt police chief, Sir Alec passed the comedian's hotel room. The door was open, and Kovacs was sitting at a desk and typing furiously, surrounded by half a dozen naked girls reading magazines. "Shall I shut your door?" Guinness politely suggested. "No! For heaven's sakes!" replied Kovacs. "What would people say? They'd say Kovacs is in that room with a | bunch of naked broads. And they'd think the worst. With the door open they can see for themselves it's all perfectly...
...never considered the O-ring problem a flight- safety issue, even though its criticality classification meant that it clearly was. Pressed, he finally conceded, "If I had heard the alarms that have been expressed in this room this week before the flight, I certainly would have been concerned. Yes sir." Nonetheless he insisted later at a press conference, "I think it was a sound decision to launch...
...most ominous moment came that same morning, shortly after Marcos announced on a televised news conference that he was declaring a state of emergency. At that point his armed forces Chief of Staff, General Ver, whispered to Marcos in a voice that was audible to the whole nation, "Sir, we are ready to annihilate them at your orders . . . We are left with no option but to attack." Marcos did not respond. Whether he knew it or not, his failure to move swiftly against Enrile and Ramos, one of the more honorable acts of his tarnished presidency, had already cost...
...MOMA exhibit does show off Mies' absolute strengths. Like Sir Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog, he had one big idea, and he thought it all the way through. No architect since has done work of such internal coherence. The openness of buildings like Farnsworth is bracing. His best designs have a simplicity that stuns, the kind of elemental integrity now sought by many younger architects, the post-postmodernists. Like millions of self-conscious moderns, though, Mies tended to equate a kind of compulsive candor with Truth. Asymmetry, architectural ornament and symbol were deemed dishonest, sentimental. His idea of order...