dry-as-dust

Yesterday, the decision emerged in a dry-as-dust news release at the dog end of the political day.

Hughes has infused new life into dry-as-dust facts to produce a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.

As Bernard Baruch points out in his introduction, “This is no dry-as-dust study. It deals with the raw stuff of living, how more than two billion men and women, including you and me, are to be fed, sheltered, and clothed — and whether or not we will live in peace tomorrow, and next year, and in the year 1975.”

Even that old windbag Polonius, played by Robert Joy, is less a bombastic grandstander than a dry-as-dust martinet.

Yet Irwin is hardly a dry-as-dust antiquary, and “Wonders Will Never Cease” frequently reveals the wide range of his reading: His description of the world’s end was obviously adapted from H.G.