Word: sparked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Symposium by Muriel Spark. Ten guests assemble for a fashionable London dinner party, with no idea of just how murderously interesting the affair will turn out to be. The author here approaches the sinister elegance of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She introduces fundamental issues -- salvation and sin, inspiration and insanity, free will and destiny -- through the medium of light but lethal comedy...
Although it is impossible to assess the troop strength of this grass-roots movement, it is significant enough to spark a backlash. Recently Oprah Winfrey, no slouch of a trend barometer, featured "self-help addicts" on her TV show. Some reconsideration is coming from movement leaders, like Anne Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes an Addict and Co-Dependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated. She now calls the term outdated and argues that it should be modernized with a new concept of relationship -- sex, love or romance -- addiction. Social psychologist and therapist Stanton Peele, author of Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment...
Just under 12 minutes into last night's game, with Cornell on the power play, Drury provided the spark that ignited the Crimson attack. The Leverett House resident stole the puck from Big Red defender Tim Vanini, and beat netminder Jim Crozier for the shorthanded goal and a 1-0 Harvard lead...
...Muriel Spark were a car, she would be getting about 50 miles to the gallon. The author of one of the most elegant short novels of the century, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, wastes not a word in this, her 19th, novel. With brief snatches of conversation, 10 characters at a London dinner party are introduced with such clarity that the reader knows who would be a bore to sit next to and who will drink too much...
Dread of aging and death, whether by illness or murder, hovers over many of Spark's characters, but that does not make the author glum. Unlike Margaret, who is criticized by her husband for liking "art to have an exalted message whereas if there was anything he hated in art, as in life, it was a sermon," Spark seems to believe that the only sensible way to consider serious questions -- religion and guilt, insanity and illumination, free will and destiny -- is with lightly lethal humor...