Word: captious
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...when a film did take a compassionate approach to homosexuality, the mainstream press could pounce on it with cavalier ignorance and captious contempt. A review of the British drama Victim, about a barrister fighting the law that made homosexuality a criminal offense, took offense at the movie's "implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice ... Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself. 'I can't help the way I am,' says one of the sodomites in this movie. 'Nature played me a dirty trick...
...citizen has certain misgivings. "Politics aside," he wonders, "is Richard Nixon worth [a salary of] $100,000? I admit his chances look pretty good, but what about ours?" Waging a sort of personal third campaign, he has a captious eye on Hyannisport as well: "The choice is between the lesser of two evils, anyway," he says. "Some people claim Nixon is trying to sell the country, and Kennedy is trying to buy it." ... With one eye on world news and the other on Variety, [Sahl] is a volatile mixture of show business and politics, of exhibitionistic self-dedication...
...death, this comic muralist had left the fullest scrapbook of a century dominated by entertainment. He drew, and drew out the spirit of, thousands of celebrities from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Anna Magnani, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and the captious craft of caricature was raised to character study...
...test might be intellectual rather than physical. Ask the boys to solve a riddle. (Let's have no captious cracks about how this would stack the game against poor dim W. Remember when everyone said that Gore would mop the floor with Bush in the debates...
...first volume of Schlesinger's memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (Houghton Mifflin; 557 pages; $28.95), is a rich, spirited performance. Schlesinger moves energetically down the years, meeting everyone worth meeting, dispensing opinions (sometimes brilliant, sometimes merely partisan and captious, sometimes dead wrong, as when, early on, he pronounces Harry Truman to be a corrupt mediocrity). T.S. Eliot wrote, "The trilling wire in the blood sings beneath inveterate scars,/Appeasing long forgotten wars...