Word: tanged
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Something is amiss in the great port city of Canton in the year A.D. 680, when Judge Dee arrives from Peking, ostensibly to look into foreign trade. What is missing-and what the Tang dynasty's master detective is looking for-is a fellow named Lew, the Imperial censor and pivotal power in the palace intrigues of the capital. Lew soon turns up dead, murdered by a delayed-action poison. The judge, of course, finds his culprit after dealing with a clutch of lively characters: the blind and beautiful Lan-lee, who collects crickets; Zumurrud, a half-caste belly...
This is the 16th Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik, 57, who is the Netherlands' Ambassador to Japan and an Oriental scholar. His writing lacks somewhat in professional sheen, but Scholar Gulik more than compensates with rich and accurate historical detail of the Tang dynasty. The manners and mores, the factionalism and regionalism of that ancient era suggest that modern China is not, after all, much more adept at maintaining the writ of Peking over the vast, disparate reaches and peoples of the Asian Goliath...
...Perhaps what gives her writing its peculiar tang," wrote Somerset Maugham, "is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal." Her own life started in bitter circumstances. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in West End, N.J., of a Scotch mother who died during her infancy and a Jewish father who died, leaving her penniless, when she was in her teens...
...ancient cork was drawn in one piece. Then a thimbleful of bright, golden liquid was poured into a small, tulip-shaped glass. A patrician sniff, a twirl of the glass, the first sip, and then the pronouncement: "Rather like a fine sherry. Medium dry. But a lot of tang to it, a lot of spirit showing through. Remarkable...
Sacred Cows. By trying so diligently to be objective, said King, U.S. newspapers fail to "reflect the vitality of life in the American city, which is so striking to the British newspaperman. No New York paper communicates the salt tang of life, the wit of New York, its physical and intellectual energy, its cynicism and idealism, its pursuit of profit and of scholarship...