Word: skeletons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that all the players are unethical, idealism is a luxury, rumor and perception always matter more than fact, and battles are fought always for personal gain and never a higher cause. Murphy has swallowed the myth whole, at one point telling us that in Washington everyone has a skeleton in his closet...
...course the truth is that there are ethical people in Washington and truer still, many a Washington player with a skeleton in his closet still believes that somewhere in government someone should be clean. The United States Supreme Court seems a logical place to center such expectations of cleanliness, truthfulness and honor...
...year to date is in fact a splendid mainstream novel exploring a theme that links almost all good mysteries with the larger literary tradition: the burden of the past. Robert Barnard, a specialist in snide japery (Death of an Old Goat), turns deceptively gentle and affectionate in The Skeleton in the Grass (Scribner's; 199 pages; $15.95), which focuses on the subtleties of the relationship between the teenage daughter of a poor British clergyman and the aristocratic family she is sent to join, as something between servant and family member, during the fateful summer of 1936. Among the moneyed Hallams...
...painter with inspiring her imagery. This time it is Tiepolo. But the ancient crone sweeping and cackling, the commedia dell'arte clowns, the quartet of nude women gently interweaving in a dance, the men employing a variety of bird noises, the eerily believable copulation between a girl and a skeleton also bring to mind Cocteau and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Diaghilev. If more explicitly violent and more frequently nude than necessary, Miracolo is nonetheless a fitting tribute to what was freshest and most original in early 20th century art. Recalling it, audiences may well end as Cinderella does, despite...
...bells of L'Aquila tolled dolorously last week in mourning for a missing Pope. The remains of 13th century Pope St. Celestine V -- a nearly intact skeleton with a wax face -- had been stolen from the city's basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio. Celestine occupied St. Peter's chair for five months in 1294, and then abdicated -- an act Dante alluded to as the "great refusal." He was canonized...