Word: witnessed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. Top Tory thinker and the man who oversaw the party's postwar shift to "the New Conservatism," i.e., free enterprise heavily tempered by welfare statism, "Rab" Butler is distrusted by many fellow Tories for reasons ranging from his barbed wit to his prewar identification with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement. Although he remains the No. 2 man in the party, Butler may well be too old for the job the next time the Tories come to choose a new Prime Minister, and there is considerable question whether Macmillan will give...
Heartbreak House has no plot, and its wit flashes, as its farce pops, only intermittently. Shaw's characters are too idiosyncratic for Heartbreak House to be, as he intended it, "cultured, leisured England before the war." But the form of Checkhov and the style and content of Shaw combine in a haunting semi-darkness that retains its excitement when the hard bright light of ordinary Shaw tires the mind's eye. Its primary quality is this atmosphere, which requires exactly the sort of orchestration of every element that Mr. Clurman has notably failed to provide...
Hooray for your reporter who did the Prima-Smith bit in SHOW BUSINESS-clearly a writer with discerning eye, ear and wit. Although you'll receive heavy abuse from their fans, and Louis will chortle ''all the way to the bank." it's encouraging to read such a clear analysis of this gruesome twosome and their gutter-grade maneuvers...
...creating his determinedly unromantic lovers, Shakespeare as a comedy writer traded sighs for banter, nightingales for mockingbirds, antic humor for elegant wit. Benedick's first sniffy words to Beatrice-"What, my dear Lady Disdain-are you yet alive?"-could drop straight out of Congreve. As for their wearing their hearts on their fingernails, it is a truism that the pair of them-he all scorn for marriage, she all scorn for men-are so antagonistic for being so much alike. Fortunately, the dullards around them dream up one bright idea: they contrive that an eavesdropping Benedick shall hear that...
...first spring zephyrs are "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings." There is the unflinching refusal to sacrifice art to the urgencies of politics: "Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936-it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit...