Word: tacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Persian Wives. A century after the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) all but destroyed the city-state, Macedonia's Alexander steered Hellenism off on another tack. Under the tutelage of Aristotle, he envisioned the brotherhood of man in a single universal state to which, in Toynbee's view, the earlier Hellenes had been so suicidally blind. In carving out his empire, he directed 80 of his highest-ranking officers to marry Persian women. But the experiment in marital one-worldism was shortlived. The Hellenic world continued to writhe in violent separatist agonies until Rome...
...Script for BB. Both Authors Caulfield and Moscow skillfully let the facts unfold their dramas. Novelist Cecil Scott (Hornblower) Forester takes the opposite tack, prefaces his little Bismarck book with the warning: "This is as it may have happened. The speeches are composed by the writer." In The Ship (1943) Briton Forester showed that he could get inside the skins and skulls of British naval officers and ratings. But in his saga of the great BB (battleship) Bismarck, half the protagonists are German, and Forester's attempts at characterization lapse into caricature. The lines he has written for them...
...part, the only sensible thing to do with love poetry, especially when the playwright has not used it to individualize the character who speaks it, is to say it as clearly and prettily as possible while still maintaining a reasonable degree of intensity. The Old Vic actors take this tack, and here again competence is the order of the evening, although Barbara Jefford is too solid and self-assured to be right for Viola. Half the pathos of the lorn and lonely girl, washed up on a strange and almost friendless coast, is lost when the actress gives the impression...
Marya Mannes, in The Reporter, took a position strongly favorable to the play but just as strongly unfavorable to the production. Kenneth Tynan, the London Observer's notoriously excoriating critic currently on loan to The New Yorker, took the opposite tack: "In every department the presentation is flawless. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the thing presented." Whereupon he let fly with a long barrage of his famed artillery at the play's content...
...bewildered Batonga were further unsettled by the arrival of zoot-suited agitators from the African National Congress who told them the government scheme was merely a plot to steal their ancestral land. When the dam began rising in tHe gorge, the agitators took a different tack, began selling magic tickets to the villagers that guaranteed that the "white man's wall" would be overthrown by the most potent god in Batonga mythology: the mighty Snake of the Zambesi, whose whiskers are the spray of Victoria Falls and whose tail stretches 250 miles to the Kariba gorge...