Word: witness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hungarian Playwright Molnár works this all out like a game of chess with delightful ambiguity, some suspense and a saucy wit. Everything depends on the two leads. In his jealous anxiety, Bedford can twitch his nose like a mouse scenting cheese. He affects a synthetic Russian accent that is weirdly comic and as the disguised suitor, he woos his wife with the ardor of a drawing-room Cossack...
...series of questions members of McCarran's committee once fired at him with a characteristically Fairbankian sense of deadpan humor. But, as few who know him at all can fail to mention, Fairbank often compresses some of his most serious observations into what Thomson has called his "inscrutable wit." On the doorjamb of his wonderfully book-laden study in Widener, for instance, Fairbank has scrawled four words that are almost Chinese in their terseness: "People sometimes; book, never," the door reads. Fairbank's humorous but decidedly cynical meaning squeezed between the lines here is, as translated by Thomson, that while...
...Agitprop. The players invest the slapdash plot with wit and perfect timing. Wheeling on crutches necessitated by a recent stage fall, Lloyd's Bill has a saturnine piratical mien worthy of Long John Silver. Though slightly reedy of voice, Meryl Streep renders the Brecht lines with impeccable intelligence. The marvel of the evening is the Kurt Weill score, arguably superior to that of The Threepenny Opera...
Indeed they will, along with those of unaffiliated amateurs rediscovering an eminent Victorian fantasy. As the wasp clearly demonstrates, the Alice books, like Finnegans Wake, are novels in the form of dreams, granting wit to animals and game pieces, annihilating space and natural law. The Rev. Charles Dodgson considered these volumes mere entertainments. Most of the author's adult life was spent as an Oxford don, pursuing the arcana of mathematics and logic...
...even Ambler's skills can make fiscal crimes committed via telex or computer as gripping as older forms of skulduggery. Still, The Siege of the Villa Lipp has more than enough cerebral twists and sophisticated wit to offset its comparative bloodlessness. And Ambler includes sufficient shocks to show that he has not forgotten how to put his horrors before his cartel...