Word: antagonist
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...years the N.C.C. has appeared to be little more than the Americans for Democratic Action at prayer, parroting a liberal political line. Appropriately, its newest antagonist is the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an ecclesiastical clone of the secular neoconservative movement. The I.R.D.'s leader, a Meth odist minister, charged last week that the N.C.C. is "captive to a left-wing philosophy which is not compatible with what most members of local churches believe...
Implicit in all such observations is the idea that the lawyer is seeking only someone fair and open-minded, while his antagonist yearns to find bigots and idiots. "It's really foolishness for lawyers to tell jurors that they want them to be impartial," says New York Attorney Herald Price Fahringer. "We all do it, and it's a lie. I don't want an impartial jury. I want a jury that is compatible to my client's cause...
...English have always been especially adept at this sort of verbal violence, perhaps because they are an island people and have learned to hold familiarity in contempt. Disraeli on Gladstone, for example: "He has not a single redeeming defect." Gladstone, in fact, brought out the best in his antagonist...
...Kate is skeptical, impatient, ambitious and confident: she seems the perfect antagonist for the institution she takes on in this, the sixth Cross book. The Harvard that appears in Death in a Tenured Position is big, smug, successful and emphatically male--a sort of hybrid of the oracle of Delphi and the balcony men's room at the Boston Garden. Its entrenched inhabitants greet change with affection usually reserved for sneezing leprosy victims...
During working hours, McKellen can be found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow...