Word: splendid
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...intruding his democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp that is as loonily effective as Inspector Clouseau's fractured French...
Strange as it seems, a raw potato has fallen from a window high in a nearby apartment building and has nearly done Baker in. Splendid! A column idea from the gods...
...State Department is looking into this matter and we are expecting a report"). The attempt worked, partly because it shocked people; it was still a bit daring in 1962 to laugh at the Kennedy style. He wrote the column in its first years from Washington and had a splendid time unstuffing shirts, though he deadpans now: "It's depressing to read a politician's memoirs and realize how little you got right." But by the end of 1974 the stake had been hammered through Richard Nixon's heart, and Jerry Ford seemed to be doing an adequate job of satirizing...
Frady refines that conceit a bit and uses it as an underlying premise of his splendid biography: to many who have been ambushed by change, "Graham has become the only familiar American paragon left; the last hero of the old American righteousness." Through the racial convulsions of the late '50s and '60s, and then Viet Nam, writes Frady, "there finally began to hang over the country, worst of all, forebodings of some actual loss of our own native rectitude, of America's constitutional decency. Perhaps no one is finally so dear as he who returns and restores...
...undercut their melodrama in order to make judgments ranging from the sly to the nasty about everything from the way to handle the funerals of world-class celebrities to the way the rest of us allow ourselves to be drawn into their self-created dramas. There is a splendid cheekiness of old age about this picture. Its creators seem to be saying. "This is the way we've always made them; this is what we think about the false and foolish world we have inhabited all our lives." The energy of the determinedly unfashionable informs their work, and almost...