Word: witting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Humanist E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) on the eve of his 90th birthday. The sage celebrated birthday and royal gift quietly with friends, then returned to King's College, Cambridge, where he has lived as an Honorary Fellow since 1946. Age has not dulled his gentle wit. Asked if he would not some day want his death to be commemorated in King's Chapel, he replied: "Oh, no, not the chapel. That would smell too much of religion. It would be letting the humanists down...
...Strangely enough, the world's largest collection of completed Ryders was stashed away for years (from 1929) in the storerooms and corridors of Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Seventeen of the 18 were the gift of a New Yorker named John Gellatly, an eccentric who had the wit to marry money and the eye to pick Ryder as the American painter who could hold his own with the Europeans. In a final exuberance, Gellatly gave his whole $5,000,000 collection to the Smithsonian, leaving himself and his second wife with only a $3,000-a-year annuity. When...
Honorary Harvard degrees go to Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe ("his good fortune was ours too"), shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis ("he trampled where others feared to tread"), and to humorist Cleveland Amory ("his pen was deft, his wit was fast...
Geometry is all very well, but it works better if it is combined with wit: witness George Sugarman's whirling yellow-green Square Spiral, which sends the eye circling dizzily through the empty hole of its central vortex. John Anderson has built an immense symmetrical flower-like wood carrousel, calls it Baroque. Minimal forms still massively demand their unrewarding space, but they are countered by weirdly eccentric shapes that are frankly frivolous, at least unpredictable. California's William Geis, the gutsiest of the out-of-town recruits unearthed by the traveling scouts, displays Perusal...
Chekhov called The Sea Gull a comedy, but any traces of wit have been pretty well destroyed by Lumet's lumbering technique. The actors perform as if they were all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only David Warner as Konstantin and some of the supporting players-notably Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Ronald Radd and Kathleen Widdoes-effectively explore the full dimensions of their roles. Lumet moves his camera incessantly to give the illusion of action, but uses fadeouts to duplicate the curtain falling at the end of an act. He attempts to preserve the tense theatrical effect...