Word: avuncularity
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...rubbishy News of the World called Dempster's outburst rubbish too. Like Whitaker, he is unruffled. Royal-watchers tend to identify themselves with the family and even imagine that they are on intimate terms. "She should be brought up short," the avuncular Dempster explains. "The message got through to Diana that she cannot behave badly and that she'd better start pulling up her socks. Since then, she has been out all day, visiting hospitals and talking to children. She is showing more interest in Charles' hobbies. She is wearing the same clothes over again. What I am saying...
...features a mix of news stories, interviews and the amiable atmosphere of a Sunday brunch. Says Editor Ron Neil: "You cannot machine-gun people with information at that time in the morning." The program massages them with it instead. The hosts (modestly called presenters, not anchors) are the avuncular Frank Bough, a veteran of the British sports program Grandstand, and the fetching Princess Di lookalike, Selina Scott, whose alluring television manner may heat up cold winter mornings. But the hit of the first show was the "Green Goddess," a supple Valkyrie named Diana Moran, clad in green leotards, who gently...
There are other reasons why Reagan frequently does not hear straight arguments from his aides. An avuncular figure, warm and generous to a fault, Reagan projects a peculiar quality of vulnerability. The White House staff and Cabinet members worry deeply when they have to tell the boss he is in trouble. One aide fretted for hours about the glum presentation that he was to make at one budget session. "I finally said the hell with it," he reports. "I decided if I couldn't tell it to him straight, I shouldn't be working here." Reagan was not visibly affected...
...sweepstakes, Hitler runs a distant second to Stalin, who sanctioned the deaths of 20 million to 50 million of his countrymen. Nor can Nazism, a brutally simple triumph of the goons, touch the tragic complexities of Stalinism-a political torch fanned by the world's idealists while one avuncular pipe smoker in Moscow was wielding it as a genocidal bludgeon. Certainly Stalin was not typecast as a satanic maniac. Hitler was, and his regime paraded itself as a national theater of cruelty. The black leather and stainless steel, the epileptic rhetoric-these were the props and syntax...
Piano lessons are compulsory. Sex education is an accelerated course in child abuse: a newly arrived immigrant cousin spends himself on Kate's leg; an avuncular friend of her family's gropes her at the movies, and a barber's free hand wanders under the sheet. Years later, Mamma tells her daughter that she had 13 abortions. It was not a neighborhood record...