Word: acerbic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Both the manner and the matter of Frost have made him the target of intense criticism?and plain envy ?among British journalists, some of whom complain that he turned television interviews into a form of show biz. Some years ago, during a brief lull in Frost's career, acerb Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge predicted that Frost would sink without a trace. Instead, harrumphed The Mug later, "he rose without a trace...
...interview, Cuba's Guillermo Cabrera Infante manages to set up a showy verbal circus, as full of puns, mockery and acerb wit as his novel Three Trapped Tigers, which was published in the U.S. last year. He wrote the book in the early 1960s, while employed as a magazine editor and cultural attaché producing revolutionary rhetoric for Fidel Castro, whom he detests-"a gangster who has become a policeman." The only things that are run well in Cuba, Cabrera Infante says, are "the three Ps-police, propaganda and paranoia as a system of government." Not surprisingly...
...nearly a decade, the Chinese and Soviets have amused or alarmed the world with some of the most acerb political invective ever hurled across a border. Last week, after nearly a month of studied politeness, the two archantagonists tore into one another for the first time in the General Assembly of the United Nations. The occasion was a debate over the old Soviet proposal for a worldwide conference on disarmament, a concept that both the U.S. and China reject as unworkable...
HERBERT STEIN, 55, an owlish and acerb economic theoretician, is a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He is now responsible for planning Phase 2 of the Nixon strategy: what comes after the 90-day freeze. Known for an intellectual agility that some dismiss as sophistry, he will need to be nimble in the task; for several years he has been a determined spokesman against the sort of policy Nixon finally adopted...
...Acerb and iconoclastic, London's Reyner Banham occupies a special niche among critics of the man-made environment. He inspects his chosen topic -usually architecture or mass culture or both-with unblinkered eyes. Then he devastates all conventional wisdom about it. His new book, Los Angeles (Harper & Row; $6.95), is no exception. Spurning the popular pastime of condemning Los Angeles as an eyesore of shallow pretensions, Banham raises a rare intellectual voice in its favor. "Los Angeles does not get the attention it deserves," he writes. "It gets attention, but it's the attention Sodom and Gomorrah received...