Word: stabs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Attempted naturalism is the issue's real downfall in S. W. Thompson's The Alcohol, and Eugene Higgins' excerpt from The Sons of Darkness. Thompson makes a stab at slipping a little social commentary into a picture of lower-class life, but defeats his own attempt at realism by a ludicrous overuse of profanity, bad grammar, and irrelevant detail. Higgins' story has little to recommend it. It is juvenile in its forced attention to detail and never really reaches the reader...
...speaking to a small group, he may stab the air with an emphatic forefinger (above). Or, as he makes a solid point, he may make a clenching gesture with one fist, held so close to his side as almost to escape notice. But his expressive face does most of his gesturing for him; people rarely misunderstand Ike in a face-to-face conversation, even though, in cold transcript, his sentences sometimes balloon into syntactical confusion...
...moonlight still shapes a white pool on the floor, a gust of icy wind still shakes the old house-but, often enough nowadays, the ghost that comes stalking is fresh from a textbook of modern psychiatry. Such old props as bleeding heads tucked under skeletonic elbows, or crimson stab wounds on vaporous bodies, are out of fashion. "Many modern ghosts," observes Editor Carrington in The Week End Book of Ghost Stories, "have become more human...
...factly and rather sadly, with an account of Churchill's defeat by the Labor Party in the elections of 1945. Churchill went to bed "in the belief that the British people would wish me to continue my work . . . However, just before dawn, I woke suddenly with a sharp stab of almost physical pain. A hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind. All the pressure of great events, on and against which I had mentally so long maintained my 'flying speed,' would cease and I should fall." By noon of that...
...week, fed up with his own "Frankenstein monster," Ronald Searle confirmed the closing of his imaginary school. In his new book, Souls in Torment, his girls are still playing their old tricks-but they are doing so for the last time. They squash their last teacher under a roller, stab their last classmate in gym ("Some little girl didn't hear me say 'unarmed combat,' " chides a teacher), and, having come into possession of some top secret information, they blow up their school with the latest atom bomb. From now on, St. Trinian's will...