Word: swiftian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...those mergers that discourage "economic efficiency" has many followers in the antitrust division of the Reagan Justice Department. Bork finds fault with most of the subsequent attempts by Congress to define anticompetitive practices and to interfere with vertical mergers. Deferential to legislatures in most constitutional disputes, Bork becomes positively Swiftian in his gloom about their capabilities in the economic field: "Congress as a whole is institutionally incapable of the sustained, rigorous and consistent thought that the fashioning of a rational antitrust policy requires...
Orwell did not view Nineteen Eighty-Four as his last will and testament, a Swiftian condemnation of humanity, as some, including Connolly, have claimed ("He was a dying man and he knew it"). Muggeridge remembers his last conversation with Orwell: "He said, 'I have some more books to write.' " Soon afterward, he married Sonia Brownell, a beautiful woman 15 years his junior, in his hospital room. T.O. Fyvel, another friend, recalls Orwell's saying, "When one is married, one has more reason to live." He died three months later...
...about the clash between Achilles and the Queen of the Amazons on the plain of Troy, does not, as he suggests, combine the best features of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. It is Kleist's tart little fragments that most charm a reader today. There is, for example, the Swiftian modest proposal for sending messages by artillery and cannon ball, if speed is what everybody wants. There is the marvelously straight-faced account of an ascension in the balloon of Professor J. There is the wonderful little parody of The Sorrows of Young Werther: instead of killing himself, boy gets...
With this film, the Pythons have gone beyond the customary limits of satire, beyond their own original premises. In their assaults on conventional morality, they generate a ferocious and near Swiftian moral gravity of their own. It is this quality that distinguishes their humor from the competition, rescues it from its own excesses and makes braving it an exhilarating experience...
Steve Tesich's love for America is an intoxicating passion. In his plays (Division Street) and screenplays (Breaking Away), this Yugoslav immigrant envisions an America that is a goad to greatness, an impossible ideal, a reconciler of a thousand contradictions, a Swiftian kick in the pants. Director Arthur Penn is fascinated with America too, but critically. He has upended myths of the Old West (The Left-Handed Gun, Little Big Man) and found desperate excitement on the fringes of 20th century Americana (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant). As collaborators, these two artists might produce high-arcing dramatic...