Word: vein
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...Face of Fu Manchu. The re-makers of Fu Manchu are clearly aware that the nonsense of yesteryear taps a jumpy vein of contemporary anxiety-all those diabolical Chinese, seeking ways and means to make Western civilization heel to the Yellow Peril...
...play that in this day and age begins, "What would you like, sir? "--"What would I like Joseph? I should like you to tell me what Vice means," and goes on in that vein--well, any play like that asks to be taken seriously only at a distance. If there is any poetry (or truth, if that's what you look for) in Duel of Angels, it's not in the dialogue...
...most of them with a significant detail: "The Minister did not look up as they came in." "He walked slowly, like an old athlete on an old track." The portentousness is obvious, even out of context. The Spy was refreshingly pessimistic and unglamorous, but in mining the same vein further, Le Carre only comes up with heavy irony...
...against the absurdities he found onstage: "What they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas. People do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions." In a similar vein, Dr. Johnson called opera "an exotic and irrational entertainment," and it caused Charles Lamb "inexplicable anguish." Says British Conductor John Pritchard: "There is a tremendous backlog of Puritan suspicion of opera...
...Drysdale is only beautiful." He had planned an introductory chapter on the sublime, but as it stands we can still appreciate something of the importance of the word from its role in the first two sections. The whole book, in fact, stands that way--so suggestive and rich a vein of history that other scholars will work it for years to come...