Word: ardente
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...Handel's Julius Caesar, and afterward turned down all the contracts Bing gingerly offered. No other singer has been able to do this; it is her legend, and she's proud of it. It became a David-and-Goliath myth which her fans loved and continually embellished, the most ardent even supposing that she refused contracts solely out of righteous indignation for not having been appreciated earlier. Recently she's become pretty candid about what was actually in those contracts: insultingly poor roles, old productions, or performance dates that Bing knew conflicted with her commitments to sing elsewhere...
Clear-eyed, strong-jawed, supremely self-assured, Chiang Kai-shek (the name means "firm rock") was one of the century's major figures. As a revolutionary and ardent nationalist, he had an epic career embracing both triumph and tragedy. Sixty years of his life were consumed by bitter uphill struggles: first against the crumbling Manchu dynasty, then against the warlords who flourished in its ruins, next against invaders from imperial Japan and finally against the Communist peasant army that foreclosed his dream of dominance in China and chased him to an unhappy exile on Taiwan...
...died in 1925, and Chiang soon took command of the Kuomintang. Over the next two years he led his armies on a brilliant series of campaigns against the warlords that resulted in a precariously unified nation. Despite his ardent opposition to Communism, Chiang at first collaborated with the vigorous fledgling Chinese Communist Party and its Soviet advisers; but with the work of reunification well advanced, he turned against the Communists, executing thousands and driving others out of the new national government. Among those he shunted aside was the head of Kuomintang propaganda, a firebrand named Mao Tse-tung...
...good as Henry Kissinger's," boasts Champagne Music Maker Lawrence Welk, and his sense of harmony may even be better. Still, the king of schmalz announced last week that he would not run for President in 1976. Welk disqualified himself after 5,000 followers, led by an ardent Santa Barbara, Calif, fan, had written to suggest his candidacy. "Politics, like music and golf, is best learned at an early age," said Welk. "Having reached the age of 72, I'm afraid it is a little late to change horses in the middle of a stream beset with such...
...1960s, the U.S. intervention in Viet Nam had turned into a bloody, bitterly learned lesson about the limits of American power. Above all, the simple, straightforward anti-Communist crusade that had been the mainspring of U.S. foreign policy was no longer very simple. Once in the White House, that ardent anti-Communist Richard Nixon began making approaches to Moscow and Peking, partly to disentangle the U.S. from Viet Nam and partly to build a new structure of peace based not on ideology but on pragmatic self-interest. The U.S. goal had always been to oppose Communism everywhere it was encountered...