Word: charming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...women have a lot in common. Both have effortless charm and a popular touch that politicians would kill for. The camera worships them: Queen Mum in her spun-sugar hat, pastel coat anchored by a huge, gem-laden brooch and a dusting of ostrich feathers; Diana in her elegant column of silk or her inspired off-duty wardrobe (including a Philadelphia Eagles jacket). These women just don't take a bad picture. Perhaps only the Pope is as photogenic...
Though he has mastered the offhand approach, Mayle, 52, has a sophisticated sense of how to make words count and how to charm a reader. He credits his skills to his early career in advertising. He had chosen the field mostly because of his favorite English teacher, who, in addition to pointing out the elements of style, noted that writers "can live where they like, work on their own schedule, choose their subject and blame no one but themselves for failure." Mayle had finished college in Barbados, where his father was living. There he discovered another lifelong love...
...mother Augustine (Nathalie Roussel), a seamstress; little Marcel (Benoit Martin, then Julien Ciamaca), a serious, curious child who reads everything he can find, from cookbooks to soap wrappers. In the first hour of My Father's Glory -- the most luminous part of either film, or of any film since charm went out of fashion -- Joseph anxiously faces a new teaching job, Augustine gives birth to a second son (Victorien Delmare), and Marcel's maiden aunt (Therese Liotard) meets her future husband (Didier Pain) while walking Marcel in the park. For this middle-aged couple, love is a waltz...
...religious context of God and Satan? Perhaps. For some, that takes the drama out of the discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism. Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity...
Indeed, people wax lyrical when they talk about Wong. They laud her talent and creativity. And then they move on to what many regard as her outstanding quality: Wong's ability to charm almost everyone she meets. The Harvard social scene is eclectic and scattered. But Wong seems to know everyone in the senior class...