Word: aristocratic
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...admirable research by Malcolm Foster, a Canadian professor of literature, consequently does not illuminate many hidden corners. But by telling what Gary was, he helps define the flights of imagination the author had to make when he created his gallery of characters. Though Gary was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat by birth (the Carys of Cary Castle, Donegal), his brief training as a painter helped him get inside the skin of his most famous creature, the artist-bum Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. Experience as a British colonial official (from 1914 to 1920 in Nigeria) lent nuances...
...member of France's Protestant minority, is too austere, cool and reserved to inspire much sense of confidence in the French people. At De Gaulle's behest, Couve went on the radio last month to try to cheer the French. The most encouraging thing that the elegant aristocrat could offer was that "things really aren't all that...
...look or act like a secondhand Julie Christie. Not especially prepossessing or crafty, she is totally free of mannerisms, as natural as someone on a Chelsea sidewalk. Her fellow players seem equally and effectively plucked from real life. The best of them is Donald Sutherland, as a frail, talentless aristocrat, whose tentative worship of the Beautiful People is so well portrayed that it turns a bit part into a leading role...
Since the end of World War II, Saul Bellow has published a greater number of intelligent, relevant and stylistically superior novels than any other U.S. writer. The only other American novelist who could challenge that record is Vladimir Nabokov, who is a Russian aristocrat by birth and an expatriate U.S. citizen by choice. He is the greater artist, but he lives in an entirely different world of the imagination. Nabokov is committed to the American experience mainly insofar as it defines his own exquisitely tuned esthetic intelligence...
...event perfectly illustrates the point. Britain entered the Crimean War on the side of Turkey, largely to defend its own imperialistic interests against possible Russian expansion. Two of England's leading generals, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, were quarrelsome brothers-in-law. A purblind aristocrat, Lucan had not commanded troops for 17 years; "the melancholy truth" about Cardigan, as Woodham-Smith put it, "was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it." At the front, battles with the Russians were hardly less bitter than the internecine wrangling between the two commanders. Finally, a stupid order was fatally misinterpreted...