Word: vividly
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Like the other books of Durrell's Alexandrian cycle, Mountolive has vivid imagery (the impact of the desert night is like "the flutter of eyelashes against the mind") and penetrant thought (no such thing as art exists for artists and the public; "it only exists for critics and those who live in the forebrain"). The book also has scenes of ghastly hilarity, as when Mountolive stumbles inadvertently into a brothel of child prostitutes and nearly loses his reason as well as his wallet...
...requests that the university try to inspire four ideals in its students: the democratic, the scientific, the Christian, and the joy of learning. The presentation of these ideals is certainly neglected and needed in American colleges. Williams may often stroke with too broad a brush and with too vivid color, but any perceptive student can tell you that his criticisms are legitimate and vital...
...many of the characters are not as vivid as they might be, it is not entirely the fault of the actors. There is some slight sense that they were a second thought on Mr. Miller's part, as if he regarded them simply as a means to his end of writing about the implications of witch-hunting. He appears to be a Brechtean at heart, but not in manner, and so has neither produced a passionate parable a la Brecht, nor created particularly memorable autonomous characters in the naturalistic tradition...
...freshness and dancing vigor of the words is Playboy's only great distinction, except perhaps for a quality of tough-spirited, oddly joyous compassion--which amounts largely to the same thing. The plotting is tenuous, and the characters while vivid and attractive do not take up permanent residence in the mind, as great comic characters do. The cast of the present revival is not much help. But the play has lived fifty years on its dancing words alone, and it is alive and lovely still...
...like those of his fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry-were "illustrative, storytelling and popular in content, or so intended." Cocky, hot-tempered and unruly, Tom Benton talked loud and stood proud, and his fame was solid. But as a new generation's vibrant distortions and vivid abstractions transfigured the U.S. art world, museum directors began to shuffle his canvases into cellar crypts, and his name vanished from the critics' scripts. Benton did not help his cause by denning a museum director as "a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait...