Word: background
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...work around the estate, gardening, running the theater. The theater, made of pungent, unpainted wood, with seats for some 80 people, has a circular stage on three levels, with a balcony overhead for patients with delusions of grandeur. There are no curtains or scenery, only two pillars in the background, a bare table and chairs. Floodlights of three different intensities play on the stage, corresponding to the patient's mood: soft white, red for excitement, dim blue for soliloquies...
Clement Attlee, the Lord Privy Seal, is to Mrs. Strauss a "little man with inconspicuous features and a toothbrush moustache," who, to make matters worse, has "a suburban background . . . smokes a pipe, loves to potter in his garden and do odd jobs of carpentry." "At a recent Labor Conference he was taken ill on the first day, and for the rest of the week was absent-and no one missed him." Mrs. Strauss is somewhat shocked that while "Attlee appears to have a deep humility, it is not quite deep enough" to make him "resign from the leadership...
...with a chance to give Waldstein a run or two to work on, but he looked at a third strike. Yale got the lone tally in her half of the second on two clean singles and two passes, all coming after two men were out. The blurred background of reunion classes milling around behind the plate trying to get to shelter before rain came must have upset Waldstein. He had a temporary streak of wildness which almost meant the ball game...
Some three-fourths of Author Barzun's book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin's difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun "a stroke of genius...
...Zimmer, Mann owed more than his plot. From his Maya, a translation (into German) of a gigantic compendium of Hindu mythology, Mann took detail, background, much, very likely, of his philo-symbological machinery. It is Dr. Zimmer too who best summed up this novel: "It is as if Hindemith composed a one-act opera, availing himself of the motifs from The Twilight of the Gods...