Word: heroic
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...leader of the Mau Mau terrorist campaign against the British in Kenya now sits in the Cabinet of President Jomo Kenyatta, and the Mau Mau is officially regarded as a heroic freedom movement...
...Breuer, the chief Bauhaus teachers of art, design and architecture are dead: Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe. Even the ideal that hovered above Bauhaus practice -that social conduct could be purified and made better by all-embracing design systems-now seems to have been a heroic illusion, an ignis fatuus of avant-garde thought: no one really becomes less wicked or more rational by living in an International Style building...
JEAN ANOUILH'S Antigone, a recreation rather than an adaptation of the Sophocles myth, explores a profound moral struggle between two human wills. In the end, neither wins. The fundamental compromise demanded by life and the solitude of heroic individuals who choose to refuse it are brought to the surface in the questions asked about freedom and happiness. Stripping away the layers of reason, Anouilh forces us to look at the universal, to see man floundering in an apparently illogical universe, driven to question the worth of "accepted" values...
...entire play turns upon the confrontation between these two universal forces, these archetypal symbols. And the most terrifying aspect of the struggle, brought out with an overpowering force and conviction in Alison Clarkson's production of the play, is that both protagonists are right. Antigone, the embodiment of the heroic will, hurtles towards death with a barely understood drive to express her personal freedom, while Creon is the human voice of reason assailing her with all the logic he can muster...
...away. If these juxtapositions of past and present sometimes seem too easily ironic, the novel's breathless pace discourages dawdling over flaws. Its humor is wicked, in the manner of Waugh, whose comedy was also of matters as well as manners. The characters' resiliency is not less heroic for taking wacky forms. As Weldon proved in Down Among the Women (1973), she loves her sex because, not in spite of itself. ∙Paul Gray