Word: though
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Even though war did not seem inevitable in July, the board of strategy was realistic: it said nothing about calling a peace conference. Wrote Dr. Palmer (before the war began) : "Recommending a peace conference was like advocating the wisdom of insurance in the midst of a city-wide conflagration." The board surveyed the background of the world's disorders, presented some political and economic principles based upon its belief that "the Church Universal ... is not a mere idea but a reality, transcending the nations. It is created by the will of God, not by the will...
...Though he has neither Lardner's indescribable humor nor Hemingway's Paris-found sense of style, John O'Hara ranks with them as a first-class, far from phoney reporter. Appointment in Samarra, his first and best novel, was good enough and true enough to make anything he wrote thereafter worth reading. Probably most worth reading are his acid short stories...
...Though sad, the stories do not make the reader cry; though funny, they do not make him laugh; cumulatively they make him nervous. The bare, observant technique draws attention to itself and to its occasional flaws (the story Trouble in 1949 hinges on an exchange of car keys for which the author makes no provision). Possibly two prides-the Irishman's and the craftsman's-conspire to allow O'Hara no ambitious flops. But readers who are not reporters will wonder how anyone can write so well and yet so rarely try to write better...
...Though few remember it, Beard was famed in the '80s and '90s as an illustrator. His masterpiece was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. (Said Mark Twain: "It was a lucky day I went netting for lightning bugs and caught a meteor.") His drawings of monks swigging ale got him boycotted for nearly ten years by most big magazines. Another time he was made to put shoes on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, prohibited from drawing cows with udders...
...retired to his tiny farm, but farming exasperated the most coldly efficient political brain of his century. In 1513 Machiavelli took time out from manuring his fields and in a few months finished the Prince. "Necessity . . . impelled the dedication" to Lorenzo Medici. Lorenzo did not open the book, though he ordered a lackey to take Machiavelli two bottles of wine...