To many British eyes, both president and country are too bombastic, myopically self-assured, lacking a properly tragic view of life, and sometimes emotionally incontinent.
To many British eyes, both president and country are too bombastic, myopically self-assured, lacking a properly tragic view of life and sometimes emotionally incontinent: Mr Bush's allusion at Camp David to the death of Mr Brown's baby daughter a tragedy, the president said, which had "strengthened [Mr Brown's] soul"—struck some listeners as unduly intrusive.
The tragedy of the students was that they lacked a sense of the tragic.
Perhaps it had something to do with precisely what Bellow hailed about his country: its unheroic materialism, its lack of a tragic sense, its indifference to high culture — all the things that Grass hated about the Adenauer years, and that many European intellectuals, on the right and the left, still find contemptible.
As a doomed business, it lacks the tragic romance of the travel bureau or encyclopedia salesman.
Ms. Howard's character, Fisher Willow, has the familiar hallmarks of a wounded Williams angel but lacks the tragic dimension of his greatest creation, Blanche DuBois.
Poppy Shakespeare lacks the tragic halo of Ken Kesey's classic, but it would be a cruel irony if some readers criticised it as overly artificial by comparison, given that Kesey observed mental illness from the outside, as a staff member while Allan was a patient, swallowed up for 10 years by institutions very like the one she satirises.
They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above all, the tragic sense of life.
But, in seeking to portray the police, the prisons, the bench and the bar, it lacks the isolated tragic hero of the other plays.
