Word: falstaff
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...fully crush the human spirit. It is true that even a dedicated young slob like me occasionally feels the pressure to succumb to head to the gym, forgo red-meat, or give up my beloved beer and cigarettes. But I take heart from the words of my Shakespearean avatar, Falstaff: “I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be, virtuous enough: swore little, diced not above seven times a week, went to a bawdy house not above once in a quarter of an hour, paid money that I borrowed three or four times, lived well...
...Hannibal was one of those supporting players, like Falstaff in Henry IV, whose extravagant personality propels them into the limelight. The trick to the Lecter character was genius uncorrupted by conscience. Inside him, polar opposites coexisted: elegance and heartlessness, fastidiousness and cruelty, insanity and insight. He's a great people-reader, exercising a hypnotic power over those he meets, and with an acute instinct for the emotional jugular. This is on display the first time Hannibal appears in the books - when Will Graham visits him in a prison cell in Red Dragon - "Graham felt that Lecter was looking through...
Something has to give, right? The man is 45. His girth is so magisterial that the inevitable Falstaff comparison seems inadequate. All that saffron in the soup--that's where he's showing weakness, I decided. So busy being a star that he's sloppy in the kitchen. To test the theory, back in Chicago I had sneaked into the prep area after Batali had left the crowd standing in applause. I found a cook named Kirsten West who had prepped the ingredients for the demo. "How's the soup?" I asked...
...wrong hands, a big ensemble like this can be deadly, but Martin is a tense, surging, insomnia-inflicting plotter and a deft and inexhaustible sketcher of personalities--including Tyrion Lannister, a bitter, cynical, high-born dwarf (he's Martin's Falstaff) and Brienne the Beauty, a huge, unmarriageable, monstrously ugly woman who fights in full armor and usually wins. Martin has an astonishing ability to focus on epic sweep and tiny, touching human drama simultaneously. The supernatural plays a role, but only rarely...
...Moore the left wing has now found its own Falstaff of the political revels, a figure who can punch as hard and fast--and as recklessly?--as anybody the right has to offer. And Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the watershed event that demonstrates whether the empire of poli-tainment can have decisive influence on a presidential campaign. If it does, we may come to look back on its hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped for the first time the potential...