Word: chameleons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Magnificent, Renaissance Florence's benevolent, art-loving ruler; Chateaubriand, 19th century France's aristocratic writer-statesman; Alexander Kerensky, who first led Russia to a democratic revolution that quickly succumbed to the Communists. In the bestiary of epithets used to characterize French politicians, he has emerged as the "chameleon." His recondite politics is inevitably labeled Florentine in the press. His most recent biographer, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, described him as "ambivalent." Wrote Giesbert: "He is misanthropic and sociable, naive and calculating, sincere and deceitful." In fact, François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand is as much an enigma...
...National Assembly as a candidate for the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance, a small but pivotal center party that won a surprising number of Cabinet posts under the Fourth Republic. Over a 13-year period, Mitterrand held eight Cabinet posts-and earned a reputation as a political chameleon. It was De Gaulle's return to power in 1958 that finally cast Mitterrand into the leftist camp. He denounced the creation of the Fifth Republic as a "power play" aimed at fracturing the left opposition. Ever since, Mitterrand has striven for a broad reunified left, a goal that...
Generalizing about M.B.A.s is ultimately a little like generalizing about Bulgarians or trumpeters. In many cases, the differences between them and everyone else (including the salary differential) tend to fade, like the colors of a chameleon, after a few years in the corporate world. Others, however, seem permanently tinted, chameleons that have mysteriously evolved into some slightly more agile species of lizard. Robert Almon, for example, wears the predictable colors: pink Oxfordcloth shirt, blue-and maroon-striped necktie, gray suit, black loafers as polished as medieval armor. One of six children of a Rhode Island family (his younger brother plays...
...popular conception of Bowie's parabolic musical career, even on the part of sympathetic critics, has been tinged with some of this Victorian opprobrium: Bowie the musical chameleon, the masquer, just doesn't seem to have the stamina to stick to one style and wring out its musical worth, but must nomadically migrate to a new brand of music and a new "persona" on each album to amuse his audience. This kind of analysis, aside from its off-hand assumption that a popular musician always changes for commercial and not for evolutionary reasons, also treats with bland ignorance the musical...
Past Tense is a chameleon play that depends very much on the coloration added by the principals. Those who saw George Grizzard and Barbara Baxley perform the drama in its U.S. premiere at the Hartford Stage Company in 1977, under the direction of Paul Weidner, will be hard put to it to recognize the version that skitters across the stage of Manhattan's Circle in the Square...