Word: toning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When I pick up the receiver in order to make a call and I hear a conversation already going on, I am unable to suppress an instinctive urge to blurt out "Oops, sorry." I fully realize that my roommates are likely to mistake that utterance for the call-waiting tone and that I therefore frequently cause them to accidentally hang up on their friends. I can't help it, though...
Maddocks' tone took off from the headline of his piece, which read, "Harvard was once, unimaginably, small and humble...
...tone of the title -- both grandiose and self-mocking -- accurately reflects the contents. Julian Barnes, whose third novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1985), earned an army of readers outside his native Britain, has here gathered a collection of prose pieces, nominally fiction, that cohere chiefly by virtue of being bound together in one book. The affair kicks off with a termite's view of the adventures of Noah and his ark. (Noah, it turns out, was not a particularly nice fellow, and his epic voyage was less than heroic in its details.) Matters then proceed through a number of other diverting...
...would have been a simple matter to melodramatize or caricature these soldiers' stories. But Atkinson maintains a tone of scrupulous neutrality, and he never loses the Point of his narrative. All along, his greatest character is the military academy itself, sustained by patriotic zeal in the '50s, pocked by controversy in the '60s and cheating scandals in the '70s, yielding in the '80s to a new national temper. Today women are admitted, there is a , course in ethics, and the incoming class is treated with unaccustomed humanity. "Demanding but not demeaning" is the cadre's new motto. Only the school...
Ishiguro's mastery of this subject and its proper tone are uncanny. Born in | Nagasaki in 1954, he was brought to England with his family six years later and educated there. His two earlier novels were set in Japan, but this one displays a sure grasp of another island culture -- England's -- that has been notoriously impervious to outsiders and immigrants. Furthermore, the young author writes with assurance about events that took place before he was born, and he does so in the utterly convincing voice of an aging Englishman...