Word: witting
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...this time, every listener was prepared for Copey's voice as if it were God himself speaking. Two famous Copeland stories involve his distaste as a public speaker for lateness and the imperious wit with which he could handle it. Three students knocked on the locked door as he lectured in "Johnson and his Circle." He ignored them. They knocked again. The door was unlocked and the three walked in and sat down. Copey glared. "All gall is divided in three parts," he remarked crisply, and then went on lecturing...
Garden, with lush, languid music by Carlos Surinach, was a kind of lovelorn-columnist's tour of Eden, with Adam, Eve, Adams's legendary wife Lilith and a hor mone-happy stranger as the disturbed protagonists. In style it was light but pricked with wryly ironic wit. Clytemnestra, with a grindingly dissonant score by Egyptian Composer Halim El-Dabh, was a more impressive work and far more complex. Both its power and its tortuous complexities derived from Choreographer Graham's technique of unfolding the story as a memory of past events sounding shrilly in the echo chamber...
Even at the height of his "cantankerousness" (Graves's own word for his special quality), he writes with clarity, charm and wit. The collection includes several stories so funny that it is difficult to believe they first appeared in Punch...
...which knows him in the beard that he grew for his current stage role, Visitor Ustinov is most familiar as wit and mimic in his appearances on the Jack Paar Show, but he complains: "All those interruptions [for commercials] while you sit there trying to be Voltaire-Voltaire wouldn't stand for it." He is particularly fascinated by U.S. giveaways, "where they meter the suffering that people have had, and the one with the saddest life gets the refrigerator. It's like watching a medieval morality play with all the vices paraded before you-avarice, for instance...
...working up so much creative lather with such a versatile hand, Ustinov is "embarrassed to say how much" he earns. His first love is the theater, especially playwriting. Though London critics have called him a master of stagecraft with a Shavian wit, Ustinov is keenly aware of their criticism that he "wins his battles but loses his campaigns." He refuses to add to his work load by getting into TV to stay. Says he with a furtive smile: "I don't want to do more and give less quality. It wouldn't be fair to the audience." Meantime...