Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. In an exchange of letters that crackled back and forth for nearly 25 years, the two novelists speak with wit, wisdom and dedication about the practice of their careers...
...contents of Shaw's remarkably closed mind. Religion is hypocrisy. Armies are idiotic. The British upper classes are smugly ignorant of life; the lower classes are self-taught fanatics and uncouth blackguards. As destiny's dutiful darling, G.B.S. slays these asses with his jawbone. Minus his customary wit, Shaw is a nagging scold. In a final soliloquy, delivered with fine evangelistic fervor by Robert Preston, the great iconoclast pitiably begs for an icon worthy of his worship...
...descriptions and characterizations can leave an indelible impression on the listener: "I have great respect for Secretary McNamara. He is the first man since Forrestal to subdue the Defense Department--Forrestal committed suicide." The Senator's active wit appears in many guises. He has developed a large repertoire of anecdotes, many of them about politics and politicians, which he tells well. Some quips he intends largely to amuse: "The only subject on which Mr. about virtually every subject Congress considers, but foreign policy particularly interests him. At the beginning of his third year in the Senate he readily accepted...
...this is amiably flavorsome matzo-ball soup opera. Gertrude Berg is flawless in her comic timing, wry-arch in gesticulation, a singsong bird of prey who pounces on the feeblest line for a resounding laugh. For wit, there are Jewish folk inflections; for character, stereotypes; for comic insight, racial in-group jokes. Following up on his 1959 hit, A Majority of One, Spigelgass proves that he can bring in greenback gushers without any risky drilling for dramatic art. He is a situation tinker, and his vocation is to be not a playwright but a millionaire...
...lived in an average anachronistic prison: the natural humanity of the prisoners and their guards, the subhuman system that makes them beasts and keepers, the soul-destroying hatred of either for other, the teeth that glitter cruelly behind every smile, the moral stench of slowly rotting lives, the wit honed to a cutting edge on iron bars...