Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Other farmers were subjected to days of verbal bombardment from loudspeaker trucks parked outside their houses. Gustav Pohl, 60, a farmer near Rostock, had resisted collectivization for five years, but gave in fortnight ago to the agitators. "They told me I could keep one cow and a few chickens and pigs for me and my family. I asked what they meant to give me for my land. They said they did not have any money right now . . ." Quietly, Pohl sent his daughter off to "visit" relatives in West Berlin for Easter, then packed a few things in a net shopping...
...dashes demandingly in and out. When mistress and wife are not waiting on him, they are waiting for him, while a neglected teen-age son keeps hoping for more from papa than a quick pat on the back, and a sophisticated elderly actress drops by to deliver a few verbal lefts to the chin. In time the wife becomes a sufficiently aware and impatient Griselda to force a showdown with the mistress, only for the two women to find confederacy more sensible than civil...
Each book of the quartet has been weaker than the one before. But this is as much a tribute to the first volume, Justine, as a criticism of the others, for it is hard to see how the febrile excitement and verbal surprise of Justine could have been maintained. In all four volumes, Durrell has created a world peopled by extraordinary grotesques; each book is suffused with love of the ancient city and each is rich in pungent, aphoristic comment on man's fate. Novelist Durrell has very nearly brought off a major project, which-for poetic evocation...
...Patrick Campbell and Bernard Shaw. What results is no play, nor is it meant to be. Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne are intentionally dramatic instruments rather than impersonators. In form, the whole thing, which reached Broadway after a road tour of 66 cities, most resembles a set of verbal duets. Adapter Kilty, with an ingenious try, displays neat workmanship, and the two stars have gone gallantly at their rather anomalous roles. But pleasant and provocative as it is, Dear Liar falls flat, and not wholly for dramatic reasons...
...whose verbal policy is not massive retaliation but massive assault, Alexander King is startlingly wispy in physique and disarmingly gentle in manner. His droopy white mustache straggles for existence on a face that frequently crinkles with shrewd, sloe-eyed smiles. King (original name: Koenig) came to the U.S. just before World War I with his father, a research chemist, and a lovably scatterbrained mother...