“America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America.”

“The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity.”

A light breeze had sprung up, noticeable only as a kind of touch on the temples, and by the shifting shadows of the camphor trees. The voices of the children playing in the grove sounded and echoed from far away in the still evening. 

Eugene Walter was one of those personages who turn up in life and leave, well, an indelible impression in which all personal characteristics—manner, speech, dress and so on—are memorably distinctive. The first time I saw him was in the spring of 1952—an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped Paris Review office on the rue Garanciere. He was wearing a faded linen suit, the kind plantation owners traditionally wore, at least in the movies, set off with a white panama hat.

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

The production of Obéron which M. Lehmann has just produced at the Opera must really be considered a first performance. Commissioned by the management of Covent Garden after the great success of Euryanthe in Vienna in 1823, Obéron was tailored to the requirements, conventions, and machinery of the English opera house, and was undoubtedly far from the real opera that von Weber had in mind. 

Miss Thalia, the Queen of Comedy, came to earth one day, after a long absence, to check up on things in her theatre, the Lyric-Comedy. She found the theatre cold and dingy, and outside saw posters announcing a play in verse about cocktails, which had closed.

By one of those delightful and seemingly inevitable proximities to which life is always party where fiction wouldn’t dare, an artist with a passion for the theatre of pantomime, ballet and circus finds herself installed in a Montparnasse atelier directly above the apartment of a young man who is a famous mime and an obliging model. T

An account of the ballet in Paris since the war can only bear the simple label of chaos. But in a good sense of variety and ceaseless activity. The inexhaustible Académie Nationale de Musique et de Danse has stood firm amidst a welter of dance companies, smaller troupes and so forth, which have organized, some to dazzle briefly and disappear, perhaps to disband, perhaps to reappear under a different name.