Word: somersets
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...romanticism with nightmarish surrealism, as attempts to "paraphrase the intellectual and emotional essence of reality." Although a rendering of Sir Winston Churchill at 80 was publicly reviled by its subject ("It makes me look half-witted, which I ain't"), it was Sutherland's portraits of W. Somerset Maugham, Helena Rubinstein and other notables that brought him his greatest fame...
...economy slowing, people at last are conserving energy. Gasoline consumption in October was down almost 8% from year-earlier levels; diesel and home heating oil sales were off 6.9%. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency gave permission to New England's largest power plant, the Brayton Point utility in Somerset, Mass., to conserve more oil by converting two of its four generators to burn low-sulfur coal. The energy supply picture also looked a bit brighter because Texaco announced a new find of natural gas in the Baltimore Canyon off the New Jersey coast...
Singer has never had greater command of his material. At times he is the Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge...
...novelist and the detective, and add to them the patience and compassion of the priest. Few people want their shortcomings exposed (biography has added a new terror to death, complained one 18th century writer), and they, or their heirs, often go to considerable trouble to hide them. Somerset Maugham asked his friends to destroy his letters; both Willa Gather and Ernest Hemingway inveighed against posthumous publication of theirs...
...hotels and resorts are battling the effects of the gas shortage, so too are Americans who like their weekends. "I paid a lot of money just a few years ago for my place in Somerset County," says Richard Pendel, a Pittsburgh steelworker, "and I'll be damned if I'll let those oil companies destroy my investment." Pendel's dangerous solution: to stash extra gasoline in the trunk of his car. Hardware and auto supply stores across the country report a run on gas cans, and in Texas drivers are installing special surplus tanks in their pickup...