Word: stiffs
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...book is in other regards quite a commonplace and respectable offering. It is an imaginative, but never too imaginative, account of heaven. Like all accounts of heaven it presents the famous rogues and scoundrels who might conceivably be found in heaven, all of whom, as usual, appear a little stiff and formal and uncomfortable under scrutiny. Unlike most such books, this one has a freshness and a gusto which almost, but not quite, overcome the triteness of the idea and the limitations which are inherent in every author who considers an imaginative description of heaven suitable material for a book...
...rampant, unconventional nature of these impish terrors is too much for the Colonel and it is most amusing to see them making excellent sport of his elevated, stiff lectures on good behavior. We are regretful when the host of adventures ends, at long last, with the children being sent away to school...
...story for anything else. His language may appear hard-boiled but it is really a carefully artificial dialect. His subjects, as carefully chosen as his style, are almost always illustrations of the same theme: the sportsman caught in an unsportingly tight place and, with various versions of the Hemingway stiff upper lip, taking it like a sportsman. The motto on his title-page states his creed more explicitly than before: "Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory...
Seven times the applause brought him back to the stage to make stiff, pinched little bows. But his face was beaming. U. S. audiences had not behaved that way when he played Beethoven to them eight years ago. They had regarded him as cold, academic; his programs seemed too heavy. Back he went to his pupils in Berlin who revere him the way Elman and Heifetz revere the late great Leopold Auer.* Criticized for having no show pieces on his programs, Auer once remarked that he left all those to his pupils. Schnabel's pupils play all the modern...
...invention is simple in appearance. An ordinary foil is attached by four stiff springs to a small, round, piece of metal which is adjustable. In this way the foil can be raised or lowered at will, while the springs cause it to vibrate, thus imitating the wrist movement of an opponent. The whole mechanism is set upon a padded mat, and attached to the wall about shoulder height...