Word: witting
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...paradox was: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." But there are rare crises when the mask is torn away and truth spills from the naked soul. The mask of England's sharpest wit and most industrious idler fell away in Reading Gaol, after the decade's most scandalous trial had resulted in his conviction for pederasty. The Wilde of this epistolary confession, here published for the first time in full (though it has been published previously in heavily edited versions...
...late Justice Curtis Bok of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was famed for the wit and sense of his legal writing; he remarked once, while discussing the unnecessary pother raised by bluenoses about sex in literature, that if a man were in the mood to be sensual, he would be aroused by reading the Mechanics' Lien Acts. Justice Bok was also a novelist and a sailor. In the best sense of the rapidly blurring word amateur (one who does something, perhaps very well, solely for his own pleasure), the judge wrote two well-received novels about courtroom life and made...
...Michael Ramsey is also a complex churchman who is facing complex 20th century problems. A Cambridge-trained scholar and theologian, he came to Canterbury with a reputation for both deep spirituality and donnish wit-a man unwilling to compromise his own stern theology, but so fond of epigrams that he gives them up for Lent. Frankly at home in high-church ceremony, he nonetheless seems at times the amiable country parson, enjoying simple amusement in self-deflation. Archbishop Ramsey always signs his name "Michael Cantuar"-the traditional Latin abbreviation for Canterbury -but he sometimes autographs pictures "Michael, Archbishop of Canterbury...
...shots so skillfully that the spectator soon forgets the film is merely a photographed play, and he works his actors for all they are worth. Robards, as he did on Broadway, makes a luminously likable louse; Richardson lacks the fire and charm of Fredric March, but he plays with wit and penetration; Stockwell, in the weakest of the parts, adds up at least as well as Bradford Dillman did; and Hepburn, though she establishes too vivid a presence for a woman who is largely an absence, nevertheless centers in intensity a drama that Florence Eldridge enveloped in pathos...
...MORT SAHL: Governor Brown is trying to kill Nixon with a blunt instrument$#151;his wit...