Word: witting
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...indifference is understandable. The man diagnosed himself accurately as "almost a corpse." It is miraculous that he had the wit and energy to remember, much less to create. Welch's world is barely larger than a sickroom, but its travel books intrigued some famous tourists, including Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster, who praised the author's "sensitiveness, visual and tactile." The style-struck critic Cyril Connolly described Welch's prose as ripening "like an October pear that measures every hour of sunshine against the inevitable frost...
...Buchwald is the nation's most popular political humorist because he is not too funny. Readers of his syndicated columns never have to worry about the embarrassment of laughing out loud in packed trains or at crowded lunch counters. In addition, Buchwald's wit is a comfort, not a goad. He is like a town crier assuring the citizenry of the status quo: the sheep are still in the toxic meadow, the cows in the surplus corn, the politicians reliably hypocritical and venal...
...York City premiere) is to be charmed into suspending awareness of the depressing trajectory of British life since then. The succeeding films follow that arc; they might be called 14 Perpendicular, 21 Tilt and 28 Down. Taken individually, the interviews have their flashes of cheer and wit. But in sum they suggest accommodation to life's dreary compromises at an age when one might hope for a lingering anarchic impudence. The 28-ers do not strut or rage or tease; they seem already middleaged, emotionally pinched, too cautious to hope for more. They speak Britain's defeat in every tentative...
...sung first by the poet Prunier, a sadder, wiser Rodolfo, whose prominence at the opera's beginning sets the tone for what is to come. The gradual transformation of the lovers' duet into a full-blown chorus in the second act is a magical lyric moment. There is even wit: a sly quote from Richard Strauss's Salome when Prunier describes his ideal woman, and a love duet that deliberately recalls the end of the first act of La Bohème. The melodies are supple and strongly defined, and there is none of the manipulative abuse of the heroine that...
...earned a reputation for being fair and open-minded. He tempered the paper's traditionally liberal editorial stance while solidifying the page's influence. As TIME's Thomas Griffith once put it, he modulated the page's "Ugh, Big Chief Has Spoken" voice, leavening its ponderous eminence with impish wit ("Helsinki, Schmelsinki," proclaimed a skeptical editorial on the 1975 human-rights accords). Now the family man can look back and thank Reston for his advice. Max Frankel stands on the highest step of the Times platform, possessor of one of the most powerful jobs in American journalism...