Word: torpid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eric Ambler has been charting the Middle East menace for years, sketching shabby cityscapes on the backs of greasy menu cards. The torpid and unheroic heroes of Ambler's books, however, scuttle wretchedly about, energized by greed and knowledge that their visas have expired. If repressive authority enters, it is in the person of an oxlike police corporal whose face bulges out of the top of a gray wool uniform that looks as if it had been boiled...
Charley is one of those torpid hybrids, cutesie Broadway vulgarity grafted onto the bones of history. Charley (Joel Grey), later to become Charles VII, is presented as an adolescent playboy too hot for the flesh ("I'm something else/ Unlocking chastity belts") to pursue the crown. Actually, Grey with his wistful, tot-like air acts as if he would be happier in a sandbox than a boudoir...
...94th Congress that assembled last week is sprinkled with bright new members who seem intent on embarking in new directions. Oddly enough, this promising shift is the result of last November's torpid election, in which only 38% of Americans of voting age cast ballots. That apathetic performance confirms a disillusionment with politicians that has been gathering for a long time...
...bulk of the play is a retelling of the Oresteia legend, and it makes for some restive or torpid listening depending on the playgoer's mood. The basic story line is intact. With his fleet becalmed on the way to Troy, Agamemnon (W.B. Brydon) sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to win the gods' favor. His embittered wife Clytemnestra takes a lover, Aegisthus, who murders Agamemnon upon his return from the war. The dead king's son, Orestes, goaded to revenge by his sister Electra, proceeds to murder his mother and Aegisthus. Rabe has drastically minimized Electra...
...food in plenty for their families, will gobble and gorge until they vomit, rather than share anything even with their infants. It was common, he writes, "to see the very young prying open the mouths of the very old and pulling out food they had been chewing." Children are torpid and withdrawn. If a man's wife falls by the trailside, he will leave her to die, then grumble if someone else robs the body first. The old, weak or blind will be tripped, pushed off balance, and at the last ignored as though dead while still alive. "Misfortune...