Word: captiousness
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...ingredients are familiar. But what she makes of them is remarkable. A lecturer at Pace University and a poet, she compresses a lifetime of births and deaths and suffering and love into just 181 pages. Her prose deftly captures the cadences of ghetto speech (by turns garrulous, captious, earth-smart), and her spare imagery avoids all sentimentality. Instead, as its biblical title suggests, Let the Lion Eat Straw is a graceful hymn of love...
...article Gold planned to write before receiving his own invitation to Washington. Once there, he is constantly reminded of his background. Take this exchange with a Connally-type Texan: " 'Now, Gold. Everybody here is a somebody, and I don't know why you're being so captious about who it is you are. He is the Spade, she is the Widow, I am the Governor and you're the - ' 'Doctor!' yelled Gold in time to ward off a crushing repetition of that denunciatory term...
Unfortunately, the Washington breakdown was far from an isolated occurrence. In addition to the traditional hardships of the concert circuit - captious critics, eccentric plane schedules, hotel-room mix-ups - pianists have lately been coping with a rash of recalcitrant and faulty instruments. "Twice in two weeks I've had the keys come right off the piano," says Byron Janis. "In Flagstaff, Arizona, I was in the middle of Rachmaninoff's G-Minor Piano Concerto when all of a sudden a tiny jagged piece of wood jabbed my finger where the B-flat had been a second before...
...Smoother in garb and in gab than most of his country's politicians, Whitlam sometimes strikes down-to-earth Aussies as being too smooth by half. One of his own party members complains that he is a "distinctly middle-class intellectual with both a prickly personality and a captious turn of mind." He also has a renowned temper. In Parliament he once dumped a glass of water on a member of the Cabinet...
...next best thing to being aristocratic and having an entree into society is being connected with the Labor Party. Every time you turned around, you were face to face with the Queen." He blossomed out in Savile Row suits and developed a taste for fine food and wines. Captious critics suggest that England gave him the airs of an Edwardian intellectual dandy who became intoxicated with the sound of his own voice; it is perhaps more accurate to say that London life turned him into a spiritual descendant of the Whigs -the 18th and early-19th century oligarchs who combined...