Word: splendid
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...international Synod of Bishops went into its final days in Rome last week, some Catholics still clung to the hope that it would somehow prove a dramatic sequel to the Second Vatican Council. Close by the Vatican's new audience hall, where the prelates conferred in splendid isolation, liberals who wanted definitive reforms manned command posts and held daily press briefings. Those who think Pope Paul is not traditional enough pressed for a more conservative line. Members of the right wing's yippie element lobbied in their own way by sloshing paint on the coats of arms...
Raleigh, "a most satirical courtier," commands the book, but three splendid set pieces are the best of it. Garrett summons three ghosts-a sergeant, a sailor, a courtier. These winy wraiths testify singly and at bold length about Raleigh, but mostly about soldiering, flattering, storms and other things they know. The illusion is so good that the skin crawls. Here, for example, is the courtier taking his leave: "This ghost, an ageless young man, ever idle and restless, courteous and cruel, unchanging child of change, this man will say no more. He touches his lips to signal silence. He smiles...
...Morris' characters now seem to coalesce in the splendid single person of a wiry old coot named Floyd Warner. He is the hero of the author's latest novel, a terse, bright fable with all the Morris trademarks-the oblique wit, the offhand revelation, the unfailing eye for what Wallace Stevens called "the real that wrenches, the quick that's wry." Stubbornly out of touch with this or any other time, living in exile in a California trailer court, Floyd has got up to the age of 82 on a diet of hard-fried eggs and potatoes...
...France as a columnist for the weekly L'Express, Revel cast his beady eye upon a more solid target, sacred, large, fixed as a monument: Charles de Gaulle himself. Then Revel had a splendid idea. As a Frenchman in search of the ultimate heresy, why not-sacre bleu! -write a book in praise of the United States...
Readers who may have wondered ever since freshman English what it feels like to have an arm torn off by Beowulf in Hrothgar's meadhall can now relax. It hurts like the devil. "I bawl like a baby. I am slick with blood," cries Grendel in this splendid fiend's-eye view of an Anglo-Saxon epic. "My heart booms with terror." Yet as Novelist John Gardner retells the story, much of Grendel's pain is pure philosophical chagrin...