Word: element
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...Neill has been blessed with a strong complement of actors and singers in the lead roles, but only two have a crucial element that earns them special praise. Tom Uskali as the Pirate King rivals Groucho in his mastery of greasepaint-mustache manipulation but never descends to slapstick. Uskali's perpetual air of bemusement gives lines like "our revenge will be swift and terrible" a wonderful screwball appeal...
...sheaf of white pages far from his body so that he could read the large-type Cyrillic characters without his eyeglasses, Brezhnev at first seemed to confirm his audience's suspicions by announcing in his heavy, measured monotone that he had come to Bonn with a "new, essential element" in the Soviet position. Then he said, "In the course of genuine negotiations with the U.S., we would be ready to reduce [mediumrange weapons] not by the dozens but by the hundreds. I repeat: by the hundreds...
...page report on the Brixton riots released last week and commissioned by the Conservative government last April while the streets still smoldered, Lord Scarman, 70, a senior judge, concludes, "There was a strong racial element in the disorders. But they were not a race riot. The riots were essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police." Lord Scarman concedes that while "institutional racism" does not exist in Britain, "racial disadvantage and its nasty associate racial discrimination have not yet been eliminated. They poison minds and attitudes. They are, and so long as they remain...
...details that Thurber glorified in his writings are just plain boring in his correspondence. Ironically, the letters themselves reveal the crucial element they lack--a good editing. "I sold The New Yorker [a piece] on which I spent a week of days and nights," he writes his friend E.B. White. To Herman Miller, another intimate, he writes. "I am enclosing [my pastiche] on Henry James. I spend four months on it two winters ago, but found on going back to it that it need trimming and changes...During the four months I worked on it day and night...
Audiences love you or hate you in this country--their responses lack complexity. There is an element of fraud in the hosannas that greet the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby every night from the moment the lights dim. The show is sensational, to be sure, but the overpowering beauty of its canvas becomes apparent only around Hour Five, long, long after delirious theatregoers have been scurrying about proclaiming it's the greatest day they've ever spent in the theatre. Nothing's inherently objectionable about an immense outpouring of love, but the flip side of this is the palpable...