Word: charming
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Wirt Ross, a shrewd fight manager, saw possibilities in Henry Jackson, offered Promoter Cox $250 for the skinny-shanked featherweight's contract. The first thing Wirt Ross did was to change Henry Jackson's name to Henry Armstrong. The name worked like a charm. Henry Armstrong became a two-fisted swinger who went into the ring punching and never stopped until he knocked out his exhausted opponent...
...operetta of Victorian days which delighted Londoners for almost nine months, will not delight the U. S. so long. It does a fairly good job of trying to eat its cake and have it too: makes gay, simpering fun of itself while it strives after a light-as-thistledown charm. a snows-of-yesteryear nostalgia. Its lyrics are mock and merry-andrew, its tunes (out of such Victorian composers as Offenbach, Balfe and Gounod) softly glide and sway, recalling gaslit ballrooms, old-fashioned gardens with gazebos...
...possible. Briefly, two young ladies get each other's dance bouquets by mistake, thereupon pine and languish in silence (except for eight or ten solos and duets) along with the tongue-tied swains who sent them. Although first-nighters felt now & then that they were being sprayed with charm as though from an atomizer, much of the time The Two Bouquets saved itself by being smartly paced, lightly keyed, freshly mounted...
From Cleopatra to Roosevelt, from a long-dead queen to a live President is probably the record biographical jump. But Emil Ludwig's two latest biographies offer similarities. They are Biographer Ludwig's two weakest books; their subjects, credited with almost equal charm, have aroused almost equal controversy about the use to which they put their charm...
...That Roosevelt 'bewitches' people," challenges Ludwig, "is one of the silliest objections raised by his opponents." Far from his personal charm being fake, says Biographer Ludwig, it is the very key to Roosevelt's unique "destiny," of the greatest "symbolic significance for our age," the reason, in fact, that "the spirit of the biographer found itself akin to that of his subject." As here traced, the decisive fact is that Roosevelt was born of Hudson River landed gentry, thus naturally acquired simplicity of manner, a distaste for arrogance and showoff...