Word: wordplay
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...Among the cover-subject designs he is proudest of are the sun ("Great Ball of Fire") in July 1989 and White House chief of staff John Sununu ("Bush's Bad Cop") in May 1990. If you haven't already figured it out, Arthur has an inveterate love of wordplay. As he might say: Read my quips...
...this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3) the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case, revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the British empire...
...barely visible lettering on the wall, part of a cafe sign reminding patrons of the law against public drunkenness. But between the elements of the painting there is a continuous jostling, circling and reflection, a sense of the vitality of form in every particular, that puts metaphoric reflection and wordplay back in second place. It is the form, and the subtlety of its myriad relationships in spaces you feel you can touch, that counts. And there are enough paintings at this level in the Guggenheim's show to convey a sense of Braque's achievement, even though its full scope...
Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...
ACTING is falsehood. Or so it is in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which a love-entangled quarter of theater people, so used to faking emotions on stage, cannot feel emotions off stage. They resort to biting wordplay that is done to the hilt in the polished but ultimately sterile Winthrop production...