Word: vividness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...handsome features taut, his fist balled in indignation, Biden was in danger of losing his audience by painting a vivid picture of ghetto hopelessness. So totally did he capture his listeners, however, that their approval punctuated the meticulous cadence of his clincher: "And these are not someone else's children. They are our children. ((Applause begins.)) America's children. ((More applause.)) Blood of our blood. ((A louder ripple.)) Heart of our soul." This was Biden at his best, the impassioned idealist displaying the soaring rhetoric that has become his trademark...
...burst of acrobatic twisting, leaping and rolling with which Ramey depicts the devil's discomfiture at the end of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele is one of the most breathtaking spectacles in contemporary opera performance. European companies clamor for his services; two summers ago, the Paris Opera staged a vivid production of Giacomo Meyerbeer's 19th century spectral curiosity, Robert le Diable, just...
...often put his awesome technique and his admirable sense of film history to trashy (Dressed to Kill) or trivial (Wise Guys) ends. Instead, it goes to that place that all films aspiring to greatness must attain: the country of myth, where all the figures must be larger and more vivid than life...
...Longworths and their circle are vivid people. No one in this book needs money; no one is at a loss for words. But they suffer as well as sin, and their human failings are drawn with a compassion that makes the author's moral tickling tolerable. At 36, Wilson already has a formidable literary career. He peoples his little worlds lavishly, and his characters are the creations of an exceptionally alert and abundant mind. The Healing Art (1980) was an early dazzler, trenchant but somewhat raveled. Wise Virgin (1982) was perhaps his best-constructed novel. Now, in Love Unknown...
Close Quarters is more than the education, under duress, of its narrator. The novel is a vivid historical reconstruction of what it once felt like to set off for the other end of the earth relying on nothing but the mercies of wind and sea. This experience is an archetype of Western literature (Genesis, The Odyssey), fraught with several millenniums of encrusted expectations. For the most part, Golding is content to let the symbolic dimensions of his tale remain implicit. "What a world a ship is! A universe!" Talbot exclaims at one point, but the energy he might have devoted...