Word: soft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mentioned in the guide. When a trip is in the offing, Villa Fielding becomes a sort of MI 6 command post. A Hallwag highway map of Europe replaces one of the rugs on the living-room floor. On their knees, hunched over it, staffers plot their infiltration routes, circling "soft spots"?places that have been too long unvisited or, according to field reports, are currently undergoing rapid change. (A "soft spot" in the 1969 guide: Scotland, which Fielding has not visited since 1966.) Ole Simon, as the only operative with an 00 designation, cuts his own orders, and they...
...Popi, Arkin speaks with an accent that smacks aptly of the Caribbean, but many of his gestures are strictly Baltic. His perception of the role is something else entirely. A slight and soft-spoken man offscreen, he manages to give himself bulk and ferocity as a man driven up the walls of el barrio by the conflict of pride and circumstance. As a comedian, he clambers over the film to reach the top rank of American performers. Barking like a watchdog to frighten off apartment thieves, or purifying English curses into harmless Spanish, Arkin transforms slapstick into exuberant social comment...
...ability and the excellent coaching of Corey Wynn and Jack Barnaby. But probably the main reason for his squash success is determination, trite as it may seem. Ince really works at trying to improve. One of his teammates said that he didn't really have great finesse or a soft touch, but that he more than made up for it by running all over the court and returning almost every shot until his opponent blew it. Using this approach, Ince compiled an 8-2 record last winter. It'd be surprising if he isn't even better next year...
...critic foolish enough to exclaim "Aha!" over gross parallels between Nabokov's experience and his literary creations is viewed by the author with scorn. Yet the soft, pervasive breath of Paradise Lost that whispers through Ada is more than an echo of Everyman's lost ardor. It is a transmogrified version of Nabokov's own lost private Eden in the Russia of his childhood. With his wealthy and gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life...
There was nothing soft or dreamy about Nabokov. He seems to have been an astonishingly disciplined, highly competitive, hopeless overperformer. His cousin Nicolas, a composer living in Hamburg, remembers Vladimir at 18 as tall, handsome and insufferably skillful at nearly everything?though he always smelled slightly of the ether he used to kill the specimen butterflies he caught. When Vladimir was enrolled in a liberal school expressly chosen by his father, he resented a master's suggestion that the Nabokov coachman deposit him several blocks away so he could arrive at class democratically afoot. A more galling comment, though, came...