Word: nostalgia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...blossomed with Sheridan Morley's new Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse. At London's Phoenix Theater, Princess Margaret and Tony joined everyone in singing "Happy Birthday." After which Richard Briers and Susannah York did the balcony scene from Private Lives (currently playing in Manhattan, amid great nostalgia and critical acclaim). Other Coward sketches and songs followed until, at 4 in the morning, the Chinese mask slipped once again. "Thank you all," said Coward, "for making this obviously the most moving theatrical moment of my life...
...folk tales, the power that changes a frog to a prince is called magic. In life, it is known as nostalgia. Wrapped in it, a newspaper becomes an illuminated manuscript, a vulgar city is transformed into El Dorado. Ben Hecht, once one of the highest-paid scenarists in Hollywood, had a nostalgia factory for a brain; what went in as the apprenticeship of a yellow journalist emerged as gilded celebrations of innocence...
...cold war were all shattering crises that temporarily created a spirit of national consensus and obscured the tensions within the society. "Now," says Sociologist Daniel Bell, "the historic tendency of the culture is reasserting itself." Adds Susan Sontag, the radical critic and novelist: "It is a kind of false nostalgia to look upon consensus as being normative." For much of the next decade, the U.S. is likely to be an increasingly fractious, and perhaps an increasingly violent and polarized society...
What really sets Akenfield apart is a sot-in-its-ways, living connection with the rural English past. With vision unblurred by the nostalgia that so often distorts literary renderings of bucolic yesterday, the inhabitants of Akenfield look back to a way of life only just starting to disappear and find it a world well lost. Leonard Thompson, for instance, is 71, a farm laborer from an old family of farm laborers. "Village people in Suffolk in my day," he says, "were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech." The "old ones," he adds...
...nobody, it appears, is so entirely free from nostalgia that he cannot recall a past moment of particular delight. Fred Mitchell, 85, for instance, is now an invalid living with his unmarried middle-aged son. He remembers that the old days were full of raw fear-of landlords, of weather, of hunger. "But I have forgotten one thing," he adds. "The singing. There was such a lot of singing ... So I lie. I have had pleasure. I have had singing...