Word: tallness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...commencement at Yale University. The scene in the historic Old Campus, though, reflected the school's profound respect for academic tradition, with varicolored academic robes and hats, the glittering mace of the university, heraldic flags, brassy fanfares and the gloomy crenellated battlements of old buildings visible beyond the tall elms. Mingling with the smell of fresh-cut lawns were whiffs of another kind of grass-pot. A few of the 2,420 robed graduates wore white armbands on their sleeves to protest the war and the draft, and two students held up a sheet bearing the legend...
Calkins is a friedly man. He is young, handsome, tall, and slim. But his pants are sometimes baggier than a hero's should be. A bronze Calkins bust or a lacquered Calkins face on the bottom of a party dish would not look quite the same as a Kennedy face did in the same circumstances...
What Davis is overwriting, it turns out, is a marvelous sort of flapdoodle that does not fit into any category that book-jacket haikuists can think of. The tall stories that Faulkner wrote when his mood was bourbon-light are in the same family; The Reivers bears a resemblance to Fools' Parade. Dark violence and piebald absurdity share an uncertain border, and now and then some mythmaker on his day off, like Grubb, manages to write within this uncertainty. A fine book, written for the hell of it, which is a splendid reason...
Nabokov's tall, gentle father was an ex-Guards officer who could trace his family tree back to ancient Muscovite princes; he was also a professor of criminal law, and that rarity in Czarist Russia, a liberal politician as well. He held a seat in the first Russian Parliament. In 1906?when Vladimir was seven ?Czar Nicholas II illegally dissolved the Parliament less than a year after its establishment. Nabokov's father signed a manifesto exhorting popular resistance to the move?and went to jail...
There was nothing soft or dreamy about Nabokov. He seems to have been an astonishingly disciplined, highly competitive, hopeless overperformer. His cousin Nicolas, a composer living in Hamburg, remembers Vladimir at 18 as tall, handsome and insufferably skillful at nearly everything?though he always smelled slightly of the ether he used to kill the specimen butterflies he caught. When Vladimir was enrolled in a liberal school expressly chosen by his father, he resented a master's suggestion that the Nabokov coachman deposit him several blocks away so he could arrive at class democratically afoot. A more galling comment, though, came...