Word: sparkingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Odds are that Conant's incisive book will spark lively debate, make the establishment uncomfortable, and produce a few small changes. But if it looks more like a brilliant analysis than a revolutionary manifesto, it is surely a distinguished public service...
...First Spark. To blame was the state's eight-month drought, which has turned the southern part of Brazil-from the Uruguayan border to Rio-into a tinderbox. All it took was some farmers burning off their land for the next planting, cigarettes carelessly flicked away, campfires not quite snuffed out, or a spark from an old coal-burning locomotive. What started as a few scattered blazes soon blew in to hundreds of fires, then thousands...
...climax of a comic novel, the scene seems a touch strenuous. Here are 13 young women, some of them naked and lubricated with soap, desperately trying to squirm to salvation through a tiny bathroom window in a burning London house. Happily, no one excels Scots-born Novelist Muriel Spark at the satiric art of making the outrageous seem natural-and the natural outrageous. In The Girls of Slender Means she not only gets away with trial by hip-size in the bathroom but thriftily makes it a moment of religious crisis. After witnessing the scene, a male character joins...
Such doings may sound like something the author picked up at the last sale of Waugh assets. Actually, this account of the giddy life in an upper-class club for young women in London just after V-E day is touched by a cheerful inhumanity all Muriel Spark's own. "As they realized themselves," she writes about the May of Teck Club members, "few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage...
This demi-paradise, this Eden for the voracious young, throbs with girlish concern for love and money, in that order. But evil, when it is finally faced firmly by Mrs. Spark, comes in the form of lust, not for human flesh but for one of the club's principal assets -a taffeta Schiaparelli dress that is lent around among the sleeker girls for evenings on the town. Does lust for a Schiaparelli justify the burning of Eden? Is Author Spark just pulling the reader's leg? A final scene is not much help. In it, the vicar...