Word: aristocratic
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...decide between them, he used both, thus destroying the merits of each. Had he stuck to his first inclination to show Belcredi as a serious man working hard at a studied foppery he would have succeeded admirably. But he continually interjected another character--that of a bored and pouting aristocrat whose chief occupation was making little moues of disdain, anger, and hurt pride. The remaining actors were uniformly competent without shining, which considering the high quality of the leads, is quite praiseworthy...
...first act goes back to 1822 or 1826 (the date is uncertain), when a French aristocrat with an unlikely name, Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce, and a Parisian scene-painter named Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre developed the professionally workable "daguerreotype." It was so successful that a French cartoon soon complained that half of mankind had become "daguerreocrazed," while the rest was "daguerreomazed."*Everything in sight was caught on the magic plates-Victor Hugo's hand, the moon, the 30th reunion of the Yale class of 1810, President John Quincy Adams (first U.S. President ever photographed...
...Aristocrat in a Blouse. Apart from a penchant for beards, these two great men are a fascinating study of human contrasts. Tolstoy was a son of the minor aristocracy who entered manhood as an artillery officer (he fought at Sevastopol) and ended it trying to be as much like a peasant as possible. The more he saw of contemporary society, the more he despised it; the more he wrote, the more contemptuous he became of "style" and "art." "The patient's special obsession," he wrote, in a mock case-history of himself, "is that he believes it possible...
...bean, the sacred cod and the Bunker Hill Monument. Portly Democrat Paul Dever, a seasoned performer and a spellbinder among the masses, who had croaked his way to national TV fame as keynoter at the Democratic Convention last summer, had looked like a shoo-in winner. Herter, the slender aristocrat, was his exact antithesis. As a friend put it bluntly, "Chris never did have that indefinable something that makes children and dogs follow him down the street." But in his campaign, Herter combined polite persuasion (best effort: small pizza parties arranged by friends) with a slam-bang attack on Dever...
Persimmons in Sparta. As Massachusetts' 55th governor, Christian Herter joins a variegated pantheon of men who have occupied the handsome old Bulfinch statehouse. The first governor was John Hancock, a vain and arrogant aristocrat who was as popular as he was inept, won nine terms in office. Poor, plain Sam Adams tried and failed to turn the Commonwealth into a "Christian Sparta." The election of David I. Walsh marked the rising tide of immigration: he was the first Irish Catholic to win the governorship. Persimmon-faced Cal Coolidge reversed the trend, turned back to Yankee conservatism. In three terms...