Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there is plenty of attention to the veneer of the gilded age: high society in New York, Newport and Washington, with occasional forays into England and France. Vidal handles the gatherings of the very bright and very rich with meticulous attention to the furnishings and small outbursts of naughty wit. Mrs. John Jacob Astor appears, commenting on the trials of idle affluence: "Now I play bridge. It is exactly like being alive." Vidal also throws in teasers to keep knowledgeable readers on their toes. Roosevelt's outspoken daughter Alice is quoted on her desire to leave Washington: "Scenes of former...
...Empire, Gore Vidal continues to rewrite American history with charm and naughty wit. -- Martin Amis' nuclear forebodings...
They are, on the face of it, a rather conventional bunch, not greatly distinguished by sex appeal or intelligence or wit. Movie stars have glamour at least, and champion athletes grace. But what do the ruling Windsors of Britain have above and beyond their right to rule? This week, as Queen Elizabeth marks her official birthday, one may well feel justified in asking what divine right inheres in her -- an almost powerless figurehead in a country now past its prime -- to command the attention of the world, let alone its enthralled admiration...
Like most subjects of biographies, Parker would be considerably less interesting if she had led a happier life. The woman who had everything -- appeal, style, brains, celebrity and that deadly wit -- also drank to excess for decades, repeatedly attempted suicide, spent her declining years in the noisome atmosphere generated by adamantly unhousebroken dogs, and was cremated in a party dress Gloria Vanderbilt had given her as an act of charity. Leslie Frewin's The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker revisits this pith and pathos more grandiloquently but less methodically than John Keats' 1970 volume You Might As Well Live, on which...
...engrossing spectacle: a mind, albeit weird, attempting to make sense out of the overwhelming flood of data that most people dismiss as daily life. Despite, or perhaps because of, what the narrator calls "my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities," More Die of Heartbreak crackles with intelligence and wit. The novel is not only proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar American fiction would have been without...