Word: servants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...final figure was Émile Moreau of the Banque de France. The others were bankers, but he was a civil servant. He was the mayor of his little town for 35 years, and that captures his character - a rural Frenchman, he could have come out of a novel by Flaubert. Insular, xenophobic, he refused to learn English and believed, somewhat justifiably, that international finance was an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy designed to exclude France...
...class, these writers made class their theme: the resentment and suspicion the unders had for the uppers, which Pinter stripped of overt political references and flipped into the power that one person exercises with cool brutality over another. The TIME description of his script for the 1963 film The Servant - that it was "acid splashed into the wound of class distinction" - could apply to much of Pinter's work: an outsider's unblinking view of the sadism with which the haves humiliate the have-nots...
...Jenkins, he accuses the old man of "stinking the place out," and he ends his final diatribe by saying, "And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arsehole to breakfast time." Wendy Craig, as the young employer's upper-class fiancée in The Servant, turns her sneering attention to the new butler (Dirk Bogarde) and asks him, "Do you use a deodorant? Do you think you go well with the color scheme?" The father in The Homecoming calls his new lady guest "a stinking pox-ridden slut" as well as a slop bucket...
...Though his plays became sparer and less frequent, he remained an industrious producer of scripts, especially for the movies. Assigned all manner of British novels to adapt, he turned virtually all of them - The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale - into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray...
...days before he asked me to accompany him to Barnwell on an evening after Hall, just as quietly as a compatriot might have asked me to take a drink." The ease with which his peers exploited women reflected their view that "a shop girl, work-woman, domestic servant, and all females in similar positions, were expressly designed for the amusement of gentlemen, and generally serve that purpose...