Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...help the reader sort these experiences, Wilson intersperses explanations, second thoughts, and pithy portraits of his family and friends. From these, the biographical outlines emerge: childhood in the enlightened Victorian household of a former New Jersey attorney general, a trip to Europe, education at the Hill Preparatory School in Pottstown, Pa., and at Princeton, Army service overseas in World...
...best of Nicolson remains his eye for the actors around him. Churchill, he tells the reader, cries often, and has a "strange" habit, when speaking to Parliament, of passing "his hands up and down from groin to tummy." Charles de Gaulle, observed in his London exile, has effeminate hands, lacking muscle and arteries in them, but already in 1941 is heard yelling "France, c'est moi!" at Nicolson in the Savoy Hotel. "His arrogance and fascism annoy me," writes Nicolson, "but there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes." Laborite Clement Attlee looks "like a snipe...
...Perfect Rose. In The New Yorker, she signed her book reviews, "Constant Reader." As a critic, she was really a constant housekeeper, tidying up after messy writers, but humming impudently as she went about her business. She could tweak A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner in one line...
...Case of Fire. In this book he is ever a model of discretion. In spite of the jacket's phosphorescent hints of lurid reminiscences about Proust and Picasso, Stravinsky and Nijinsky, the author does not intrude upon their saintly privacies. He also rarely allows the reader to enter into his own. He speaks from a distance, less confessor than professor, looking up from his lectern every few moments to savor appreciative glances...
...sister of the wife in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. It is no accident that Pinter adapted Mosley's earlier novel for the movies. For both writers, ambiguity is truth itself. And for Mosley's characters, a mere problem of survival is too simple. The reader who follows the course of Assassins to its appropriately absurd end will be rewarded by a sophisticated plot, a cartographer's awareness of English landscape and a wealth of similes that are nearly as good as Mary McCarthy's. But characters, action, society? Hardly...