Word: vic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
...which is predictable -- but not too predictable. Lodge is a writer who seems to favor schematic setups precisely because they enable him to play sly variations on the formulas. Left-wing Robyn, for example, decries Vic's factory as a hellish model of capitalism in extremis and dismisses his maneuvers against rival companies as "a lot of little dogs squabbling over bones." Yet while tagging along to a trade show in Frankfurt, she can't resist helping him bring off a negotiating coup for a piece of automatic machinery that will replace several workers. Vic charges that Robyn's scholarly...
...apex of his stage career -- in the mid-'40s, when he and Ralph Richardson led the Old Vic company through triumphal seasons in London and New York City -- Olivier could spread out the banquet of those contradictions in a single evening. In Henry IV, Part I, he was the stuttering, heroic Hotspur; in Part II, the cagey-senile Justice Shallow. The curtain would fall on his Oedipus, with its searing scream of self-revelation; after intermission he would mince on as Mr. Puff, the giddy paragraphist of Sheridan's The Critic. It was all part of a 70-year striptease...
...When you take a lot of dumb penalties, you can't expect to challenge a strong team like Harvard," Yale Coach Vic Russo said...
...fairly successful tennis duo at the posh Houston Country Club, and when Bush ran unsuccessfully for Congress, Baker's first wife, Mary Stuart, was an around-the-clock volunteer. Later, when Mary Stuart lay dying of cancer in 1970, George and Barbara Bush spent hours at the hospital. Says Vic Gold: "There is just no way to exaggerate the bond created during a crisis like that...