Word: tosspot
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Ireland's tosspot Playwright Brendan (The Quare Fellow) Behan, 36, bedded in a Dublin hospital after tying on a monumental jag in London (TIME, July 20), scrawled a "confession" for a Dublin Sunday newspaper. "I'm neither dead, dying, drunk nor dotty," wrote he. ". . . It is true, however, that I am an alcoholic." Why does he tipple? "First, because I like the stuff. Secondly, because I like company, and thirdly, because a pint of orange or lemon juice is twice the price of a pint of stout...
...with the peat-bog Melodys, Con rides swaggeringly forth to avenge such an insult with a challenge, only to stumble blankly home, all the posturing and pride crushed out of him, to kill that last emblem of his dream, his blooded mare. As confirmed a dream addict as any tosspot or down-and-outer in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Con Melody stands apart from them in having a family around him-a lowborn wife who has never ceased to love him, a high-mettled daughter increasingly roused to hate. In the costly game of lies...
True enough to the seven-leagued book, Carton is introduced as an untrustworthy, melancholy rummy-brilliant lawyer and all that, but essentially a tosspot. Bogarde flips his banister's wig over happily married Lucic, and from then on, both sides of the English Channel are awash in his nobility. Director Ralph Thomas leaps like a mountain goat from peak to peak: Lucie's love for Charles Darnay, the revolutionary mobs swarming in the streets of Paris, and finally Sydney Carton's self-sacrificing death to save Darnay. But inevitably the film must miss many of the deeper...
Frans Hals, father of 14 and no mean tosspot himself, attacked the canvas with all the enthusiasm of his age, disdaining preliminary sketches in favor of a bold, direct approach with brushes loaded with paint. In later ages, the elegant powdered peruke of the 18th century looked askance at Hals's clearly visible brush strokes. But French 19th Century Painter Edouard Manet grasped Hals's secret of laying colors side by side, used it for his own bold compositions and made the technique a cornerstone of French impressionism...
...tour de force of long-range diagnosis came to the conclusion that the fool may have been right. Physician Summerskill worked it out this way: Aguecheek was drunk every night. His tippling could easily have caused cirrhosis of the liver Even Sir Toby Belch, no pathologist but a fellow tosspot, suspected this: "For Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy." A cirrhotic liver is relatively bloodless...