"What we have created is sensitive and well considered, not a gratuitous exploitation of suffering purely for the purposes of amusement," he told me.
This is a daring claim, which involves the late Tolstoy judging a work co-authored by the mid-career Tolstoy (who did a lot of things "for the purposes of amusement").
Commenting on "Android Karenina" in the Guardian last month, Jay Parini ("The Last Station") speculated that Tolstoy would have been "horrified by the notion of changing his work in absurd ways for the purposes of amusement": "Tolstoy," Parini clarified, "was not a man with a sense of humour.
Deliberately staying away from "highly recognizable branded toys and characters," Burkard's Genus Toys is less about "nostalgia or dislike," existing for the purpose of visual amusement.
Believe me, I get that I don't score well on anybody's "coolness" scale, but again, there must be lots of married people who are more socially awkward than myself, even if my sole sense of purpose or amusement in life comes from maintaining a daily necktie blog.
As Voltaire himself described it, the purpose of Candide was to "bring amusement to a small number of men of wit".
But she displayed a good deal of amusement about the lawsuit's purpose in an opinion in January that quoted lyrics from the Barbra Streisand classic "The Way We Were".
The authors of the piece must be presumed to aim at even a higher purpose than the amusement of a very idle hour.
Several things are murdered in "The Yakuza and the Mermaid" — a Japanese gangster, a Cole Porter song — to no clear purpose beyond the amusement of the film's writer, photographer, editor and director, Chris Benker.
A low murmur of amusement reverberated.
