Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS, by Ronald Alexander. A glib, gabby phony of a TV writer (Robert Preston) tries to shore up a crumbling career with sleight-of-tongue, and makes...
...Chinese Prime Minister is an urbane liar of a play. In a triumph of style over substance, it serves its mental hash like Beluga caviar, pours its intellectual eyewash like Dom Pérignon. This sleight-of-hand artistry succeeds for two reasons. Playwright Enid Bagnold loves the English language with rare fidelity, and in the present semi-illiterate state of the U.S. stage, pure English makes an irresistible lover for an audience. Equally indispensable is an actress who can do no wrong from first entrance to final curtain. Margaret Leighton's eyes are wounds of inner pain...
...hills blue and purple and vermilion, heaping the valleys with shimmering veils of mist. In that weird, wet Atlantic light-or so they say-the swarthy chieftains and pale queens who once ruled the five kingdoms of Celtic Ireland still clatter across country. As the island's endless sleight-of-sky creates and dissolves horizons, the landscape seems dreamily unreal. The reality of Ireland is special: it lies on a border region where tragedy and laughter, jollity and gloom, hell and the happy isles converge-and as such it may reflect human existence more truly than what usually passes...
...Sleight of hand, of course. But in his artful nets Sansom catches as much of the puffy anguishes and the razor-finned sorrows of middle-class life as any other story writer now at work. He makes many of his comments in metaphor. In The Vertical Ladder he describes a boy's slow ascent, in response to a dare, up a ladder on the outside of a six-story gas tower. The farther he climbs, the more terrified he becomes of the heaving ground below. When he reaches the top, he discovers that the last dozen rungs are missing...
...will realize that the things that troubled him all along about Drill-Pig are really the result of deliberate contrivance: he has been hornswoggled into believing that he is being given a fictional insight into one kind of life while actually being presented with another. Monsarrat's novelistic sleight-of-hand can be excused only as a demonstration of a conviction that the code of Communism is identical with the code of freedom, and that the philosophic claims of Western civilization are only hypocrisy. The excuse seems worse than the trick...