Word: witting
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...pattern has become classic: a nation emerges from the colonial yoke, lustily declares its independence-and then succumbs to the totalitarian mode. French Philosopher Jean-Francis Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, tries to analyze this alarming trend in a book filled with mordant wit and intensity. As a kind of historical prosecuting attorney, Revel puts Joseph Stalin in the dock, then offers witnesses to the crime of totalitarianism. It was the murderous Russian dictator who showed the 20th century how to construct a hermetically sealed tyranny, says Revel. It is the Stalinist model that is being sedulously imitated...
With his characteristic self-parodying wit, Nabokov once said: "I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better-balanced mad mind than mine." It was the mind of an exile imprisoned in memories of a culture swept away by revolution and war. Born April 23, 1899, into an intellectual, upper-class St. Petersburg family, Nabokov enjoyed the benefits of wealth, position and a Western European education. English was his first language, taught by an English nanny. French and Russian were learned, as he said, "at my nurses' knees-two nurses, four knees." His mother encouraged his early poetic...
...chance that a creditable performance could be salvaged from this trash. One gem, an example of Rouscher and Taradesh's efforts at alliteration and their aspirations to literary merit, has Catherine telling Douglas, "If you don't love me, Larry, don't lay me." Such is the level of wit in this relentlessly awful movie...
With The Importance of Being Ear nest Wilde raises frivolity to high fash ion, attains a comic nirvana through sheer nonsense. Apart from a wonderfully sly-tongued cast, which this production has, the play demands a director who can crack the combination of its elegant wit and satirical wisdom with the silky fingers of a safe robber. Stephen Porter is just that sort of director, and the stamp of his assurance is his total trust in the playwright...
...bill on family planning is passed by the government, some 30,000 new jobs must be created each year. Thus there is little or no resentment against foreign investors, save for the lunatic fringe of the I.R.A. In fact, the Irish color the overseas invasion with a touch of wit. Asahi, the $1.8 billion Japanese chemical concern, planted a $100 million textile factory in the barren wilds of Mayo, a western county haunted by memories of famine and emigration. Its peasantry have always been so poor that after the mere mention of "Mayo" they intoned the prayer "God help...