Word: wits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cyrano de Bergerac. Oscar-Winner Jose Ferrer plays Rostand's poet-swordsman with wit, dash and eloquence (TIME...
...judgment was overly harsh. Though much of Bierce is intellectual dandruff from an unkempt ego, the best of the wit still sparkles, and a few true-eyed Civil War tales are at least as durable as war. Biographer Fatout fails to indicate the company Bierce keeps-Poe, Melville, Stephen Crane, H. L. Mencken-the slender, off-key tradition of pessimism in American life & letters. "Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman's suffrage and prohibition?" sulked Bierce in 1912. The old (71) soldier wanted to see if Pancho Villa and his Mexicans...
...clearly. He is particularly adept at the critics' most difficult task--describing sound. Only occasionally does he lapse into Downesian superlatives or vague adjectives like "good" and "adequate." His criticism of performance is objective and incisive; his evaluation and exposition of form is wonderfully clear. Thomson's brightness and wit ("Wagner's musical dramas are conceived for a theater of whales") make him very pleasant reading for the layman...
...Michael Straight of the New Republic picked up his telephone in Washington one morning last week, London was on the wire. His caller was his old friend Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Nation. Editor Martin was in a high huff about a "rather dirty trick," to wit, the liberal New Republic, which had long seen eye to eye with the New Statesman, had turned on Fellow-Liberal Martin in a most unpleasant manner...
Test Matches. Cooke makes no attempt to be a political oracle, is not regarded as such in Britain. Ordinarily he avoids political predictions, sticks to interpreting what has happened, and, in doing so, usually leans toward the Administration line. But his shrewd wit can often knock an overblown issue down to its true perspective. When other correspondents wrote of a 'Rising tide" of anti-British sentiment in 1949, Cooke observed: "Senator Kem of Missouri . . . has never constituted a rising tide...