Word: solemn
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...hush settled over the House of Commons. On the benches, every member wore a black tie; the galleries were crowded with peers, ambassadors and solemn visitors. At 62, Aneurin Bevan was dead, and the House of Commons paid him homage. "He was a bonny fighter, and a chivalrous one," said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, chief of the party Bevan had railed against all his life. Said Labor's Hugh Gaitskell: "His death is as if a fire had gone out-a fire which we sometimes found too hot, by which we were sometimes scorched, but a fire which warmed...
...hole, like The Hole, is many things. The characters see in it trinitarian aquaria, golf-players, junction boxes; and one, The Visionary, sees people waiting for "the solemn unveiling of the great window in the south transept whose quote or rather misquote many-coloured glass will God willing in all probability stain the white radiance of eternity unquote to the everlasting glory of God." (I haven't the foggiest idea whether or not the play is a Christian play, but I am certain that upholders of both points of view will be found after every performance.) The hole...
...revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself-Yea, all which it inherit-shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep...
Still under 30, Mason becomes "the solemn apostle of the groin." tours Europe with a raft of erotica, cases of twelve-year-old Scotch and a pneumatic mistress named Rosemarie ("that great walking Beautyrest of a woman"). When he is not blacking Rosemarie's eyes, Mason likes to pontificate on Topic A: "Sex is the last frontier ... the only area left where men can find full expression of their individuality...
Laura is not the street's only eccentric. There is Big Foot, a solemn and terrifying prankster who expresses his view of an unwashed world by getting a job driving a bus, hauling his passengers five miles beyond the city, and then forcing them to get out and bathe. There is Man-Man, who writes random words in the street, repeating a vowel for several blocks if he likes its looks. Author Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, understands well that his comical characters do not live comic lives, and his best sketches are shaded with compassion. When police drag...