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“... witty concision is still quotable (on Gielgud in modern dress: ‘The general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’), much of his excitement outliving the occasions that produce it. But there have been other theatre critics with dapper styles and deep commitments whose names faded once their work slid out of print, once-prominent tastemakers such as ...”

“... whose wealthy but very dysfunctional family introduced what a later commentator called ‘a pretty smart touch of insanity’ into the Foote genes. His early years are typical enough of a spendthrift younger son battling his way out of provincial obscurity: a curtailed career at Oxford noted mainly for its bibulousness; a failed business venture in the ...”

“... women as both objects and victims of male sexual desire. Instead of the servus callidus, the smart-alec slave, we get a new stereotype: the bona meretrix, the hooker with a heart of gold. The female characters in Terence – including prostitutes and even mothers and mothers-in-law – are almost all nice, admirable, thoughtful, victimised people. The ...”

“... during their February 1968 occupation of Hue than the My Lai killers did. The Vietcong were merely smart enough not to allow their massacres – or their frequent disembowellings and live burials of village chiefs who declined to support them – to be recorded on camera, as My Lai was, or to become the object of war crimes trials. A majority of American ...”

“... be called ‘Las Palmas, Weekend-in-Havana . . . Pussycat . . . Tropicana . . . Flamboyant . . . Don Camillo . . . Metropole, Lido, Apollo Theatre’. All the same, it’s no use tucking this list in your top pocket and heading for the tropics in search of a wild night, as Chernoff makes a practice of ‘switching them from one town to another’ and tells ...”

“... hint of France’: ‘the white wine’, ‘the shops’, ‘the high-heeled Lolitas in the smart areas of Providencia’. In Les Masques, he revels in the clear Santiago mornings and imagines the first balmy days of the Popular Front in France. Meanwhile he had begun to face the fact that Cuba was not the place he’d remembered. In February 1971 when ...”

“... Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each brief and delicious horripilation), and the marker of this grand spiritual event ...”

“... The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon, who with Don DeLillo has done more to anatomise and dramatise the world of covert action than any ‘authorised’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal ...”

“... of suspended anxiety: the urge to fall asleep on an uncomfortable bench, to eat food you don’t need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied ...”

“... Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.Then Trump fired the illegal immigrant labourers, ‘the Polish brigade’, after they’d completed their work, meaning that they were deprived of wages and benefits. The US Labor Department filed suit against him, a federal ...”

“... Silent One’) Don Hancocks, shall I no more see your face frore, Gloucester-good, in the first light? (But you are dead!) Shall I see no more Monger with india-rubber Twisted face ...”

“... as had Heinrich Jalowetz and Luigi Dallapiccola before him: Hans and I had published an article on Don Giovanni by Dallapiccola in Music Survey in December 1950, which had brought Jalowetz’s observation to our attention. One might argue about the prophetic dimension, but what is indisputable is the extraordinary intensity and compression of the music. It was ...”

“... Values Voter Summit, blames the allegations against Kavanaugh on the Fabian Society: ‘They don’t like what America is and what it represents, and they want to change us to another system. In order to do that, there are three things they must control: the education system, the media and the courts. The first two of those they have.’ But now they ...”

“... Cao’s is ultimately a tragedy, as his first modern critic, Wang Guowei, understood, even if we don’t possess the exact version Cao made of its ending.4 But the place of wit within it is not at all like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement ...”

“... had a camera, a bush hat and carried no weapon), introduced himself as an adviser and said: ‘Don’t forget to write about the ARVN! It’s their war, too!’ I said I would, and indeed did, prophetically: ‘It is on these little men in their oversize American helmets that the future of South Vietnam will ultimately depend.’ As a battle, Attleboro was ...”