Word: torpor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that even admiring contemporaries could not explain away. Henry Adams, writing a delicately equivocal notice of an early Howells novel (one of the pleasures of a collection of criticism is seeing eminent men of the past weasel out of tight places as shamelessly as critics of today), hints at torpor by remarking that the author must certainly have had feminine help in constructing so dainty a work. An anonymous English critic finds "a gentle current of interest" running through Howells' work, although he admits to an uncontrollable urge to kick the author's virtuous heroes. An American lady...
...were running out, he answered his own question as to what Fascism was all about: "One could call it irrationalism." But the irrational leads to boredom when it does not also lead to crime. All the frenetic posturing of Fascism led to Mussolini's last desperate apathy-almost torpor-and his meat-shop death. Mussolini's articulate explorations of his own dilemma give an awful fascination to Hibbert's history. In the end, it makes it possible to pity the Fascist dictator in a way that no one has ever pitied Hitler...
...fragile world that seemed to have nothing more on its mind than fun and leisure. In favoring mythology, the fashionable Jean François de Troy still kept the mood. His Leda could be any comely marquise languishing in her bath. Everything about the painting-its heavy lushness, its torpor, its sybaritic atmosphere-suggests an overripe society about to go rotten...
Police brutality, which Parisians have just gotten around to protesting, is by now beside the point. If one re-reads the Sarte Beauvoir manifesto, it sounds curiously out of date. The question now is whether the police can rally from their torpor long enough to prevent chaos. (Ironically, at the same time that police impotence has made things easier for the OAS, the Organization's popular support is rumored to be falling off. It is partly for this reason that the hope of a future putsch has been abandoned, and the campaign of allout violence adopted...
Yesenin-Volpin's pessimism and rebelliousness come naturally. His father, the great Russian village poet, Sergei Yesenin, was an ardent early Bolshevik, whose increasing disillusion with Communism was accompanied by a marriage to Dancer Isadora Duncan and a slide into alcoholic and narcotic torpor. His bastard son, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, was the result of a liaison with a Russian writer-translator, Nadezhda Volpin. Shortly after his son's birth, Yesenin slashed his wrists in a Leningrad hotel, wrote his last poem in his blood, then hanged himself...