Word: wondering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks, people...
There was one case, she remembers well, when she was turned down 21 consecutive times. But Patsy Morris is not one to take rejection personally, and she finally got an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer to say yes. Small wonder she runs into resistance: what she wants is 200 to 400 hours of someone's time and work for no pay. The people she is telephoning are lawyers; her "clients" have all been condemned to death. Thanks in large part to Morris' more than two years of dedicated work, only three of Georgia's 89 death...
...novel's aggravating weaknesses. Readers have been here long, long ago. Smiley, the cerebral sleuth, may be as corpulent as Nero Wolfe, but in this adventure he is suddenly Sherlock Holmes redivivus. His obsessive enemy is a new version of Dr. Moriarty. The audience is Watson, condemned to wonder what the detective is up to when he examines those cigarettes and whom he sees in that faded snapshot - questions resolved at the proper theatrical instants. Moreover, Karla, in a pivotal chapter, turns out not to be inhuman after all; he has, in fact, Victorian sentiments, although in all previous...
Admittedly, modern times are fraught with real hazards, and no sensible person would sniff at prudent precautions. Still, it is hard not to shudder at the sheer volume of disquieting cautions, at the constancy, variety and intensity of the fearful clamor. Indeed, one may reasonably wonder whether the very climate of alarm itself has not become a hazard to health and serenity. Everybody's psyche now takes a drubbing day in and out from the concatenations of danger. An American can scarcely make a move nowadays without being pushed into a state of alert...
Other oldtimers on the court hung on long after they should have retired. Justice Hugo Black, who died in 1971, tried to cover up a stroke suffered while playing tennis; his colleagues began to wonder if he was becoming senile. In one pathetic scene, Justice John Marshall Harlan, once one of the court's leading intellects, was trying to sign a denial for review from his hospital bed. Nearly blind, he signed the bed sheet instead of the document. Justice William Douglas tried to exert influence even after he retired. He attempted to file a dissent in a campaign...