Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comparison with O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night best illustrates the underlying spiritual weakness of Mr. Arcularis. The broken hearts of O'Neill's play still overflow with their own power over both life and death; even in sordid recrimination and disillusionment there is the hint of victory. In Aiken's play the affirmation lacks conviction; it is beautiful but momentary, and cannot exist as one with the horrors. If Aiken had meant to say this--if this is something to say--his play would be successful in every respect. I do not believe he did mean...
...burning desire to be a motorcycle racer. He is the eternal figure with little talents who feels that he has a mission to do great things. "Isn't there a circle around my name?" he asks. The world that Mr. Hargrove paints in Memphis, Tennessee is sordid, phoney, materialistic. Yet the reason why the play fails is that Roy Wilson is no better than the world that he rebels against. His "martyrdom" is meaningless beyond the theatrical pathos which is quite effectively created. If the ethics of success or of religion fail to provide an answer, why a neurotic...
Despite the story's carefully hidden sordid blotches-only a romantic musical 100 years hence will entirely erase them-and despite the determinedly sentimental tone ("any woman who has been loved as I have been loved"), a touch of dignity, be it of Windsor or of Baltimore, still shines through. But many a reader may linger longest over the remarkably gentle, paternal letters written to Wallis by Ernest Simpson after the King's abdication. They contain a question Author Windsor must sometimes ask herself: "And would your life have ever been the same if you had broken...
...charmed a pretty brunette French teacher and accomplished skier named Collette Thomas into marriage. They lived in "a series of ghastly, sordid rooms and flats," while he scrabbled up the drawing-room-comedy ladder. Then in 1936 he made his Broadway debut in Sweet Aloes and hit the top. Back in London he starred in French Without Tears, Design for Living, No Time for Comedy. Then, to "get a bit of money," Harrison temporarily left the stage for movies (a medium he dislikes), met George Bernard Shaw himself in the course of making Major Barbara...
...four years in power, the military junta of 38-year-old Lieut. Colonel Nasser could boast of considerable progress. It had overthrown a corrupt monarch, broken a sordid feudal aristocracy's long-held power over Egypt's politics, disowned the murderous fanaticism of the Moslem Brotherhood and driven British troops from Egyptian soil after 74 years of occupation. It had imposed some stability. It had done less well in grappling with the ancient miseries of one of the world's poorest countries. By making his deal for Communist arms, Nasser had ended Egypt's dependence...