Word: witting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...closer to journalism than to formal academic history. Yet in recent years the academic attacks on the Durants have diminished-perhaps partly because in the U.S. the writing of history in general has begun to free itself from the 19th century Germanic mold, in which color was suspect and wit was heresy...
...even a dictatorship, can impair their basic dignity, which often reaches the point of anarchy, because "the Spaniard always adapts the laws to his personality and never the other way around." Diaz-Plaja, in fact, sees his countrymen's pride as so overbearing that, for all its wit and insight, his book might have been better if he had not even bothered with the Spaniard's subsidiary sins...
...list of 70 possible presidential candidates. But every time they met, explained Board Chairman Fairfax Cone, "all had the same candidate-Mr. Levi. He was our standard. No others matched that standard." A shy, unpretentious man who likes bow ties and fine cigars, Levi, 56, has employed a dry wit and a lawyer's tough logic in his pivotal task under Beadle: raiding other faculties of their top talent. An aristocratic intellectual who reads widely at jet-pace speed, Levi developed a rapport with academicians that neatly complemented Beadle's administrative and fund-raising skills...
John Crowe Ransom says that Jarrell wore a "triple crown"-"a pure Pity, an embracing Weltschmerz, and a wry ironic Wit." The pity sometimes seemed absent from his own reviews. Alfred Kazin recalls a sideswipe in which Jarrell wrote that some crypto poet's work had "hidden treasures," but that finding them was "like looking for the gold in sea water." This sort of wit provided the sparkle to his otherwise brackish novel, Pictures from an Institution...
Handsome, small, competitive, Jarrell was savage to the false in art; yet he spoke to his own students, in the words of Poet Robert Watson, "as if they were potential Homers." Berryman recalls the "black wit" and "cruelty" of his criticism, yet he was personally kind. Lowell himself acknowledges a debt to Jarrell, who "twice or thrice must have thrown me a lifeline...