Word: bearing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...working partner in a London bookshop. She lives alone in a snug flat over the store. She is astute, self-sufficient and discreet. Occasionally, when the mood is on her, Rachel goes cruising, though she puts the matter even less romantically: "I go out, seek companions, bear them home . . . No bourgeois sentiments for me, no noble passions." Elsewhere, Anita Brookner's questionable heroine pitches her case more strongly: "I had resolved at a very early stage never to be reduced to any form of emotional beggary, never to plead, never to impose guilt, and never to consider the world well...
Readers are not to be blamed if they keep an eye on the silverware. People who boast of their integrity bear close watching: they may not be outright thieves, but it is a good bet that their righteousness masks a shifty character. So A Friend from England is an ironic title, unless Brookner is deluding herself -- and there is not much chance of that...
Standing over my seat in the airplane, he shadowboxes with the empty aisle just darkened for takeoff: "It's like a fighter who's got his guard up high, looking over at 'the Bear' " -- his head periscopes over his hands -- "and you expose yourself to these terrible body blows. Drugs." His midsection abruptly gives under the imagined punch, but the hands stay up. "Debt." He buckles again. "The purchasing of America. Energy." It is Jesse Jackson's analysis of the gut dismay he finds in contemporary America. He is an ecumenical collector of dismays...
City Councillor Sheila T. Russell said, "Cambridge is going to bear the brunt of the problems with this plan. We should not, because we have already suffered through the 'T' development at Alewife...
...forms and styles of power are various. Dictators are forever strutting the tinhorn's impersonation of gravitas. Brute power is only one of the cruder types, and it is sometimes subdued by other forms: a moral gravitas, for example. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his gravitas to bear against men of power who were morally vacant. Gravitas may be aggression, but it may express itself otherwise, as something withheld, as a dignity and forbearance...