Word: charming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sectarian morality on a world already hungry and facing billions of new mouths to feed in the coming decades. One Spanish critic said the Pope had "become a traveling salesman of demographic irrationality." Says dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung: "This Pope is a disaster for our church. There's charm there, but he's closed-minded." The British Catholic weekly the Tablet summed up Cairo, "Never has the Vatican cared less about being unpopular than under Pope John Paul...
...eight languages, the Pope chooses his idiom to suit his dinner companions. Says a Vatican aide: "He listens, talks directly, asks questions, puts you at ease. After five minutes you forget you are talking to the Pope." For visiting bishops with problems to share, he can turn on the charm, singing and joking -- although his humor runs more to irony and good-natured kidding. After the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung was censured for a book questioning papal infallibility, John Paul commented, without malice, "And I'm sure Kung wrote that infallibly...
...Circle, seems to have a larger purpose, which is to challenge the supposed glamour of the bright, bibulous young writers who drew themselves up to the round table at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. Yet Rudolph remains of two minds about his subjects. He wants them to charm us, but he also wants to show how their infinite distractability stunted their lives and careers. His ambivalence creates not an intriguing thematic tension but merely confusion...
...attendant shepherds and fops have a whirly, burly charm, and the bucolic maids (notably William Cates' Phebe) suggest Benny Hill on his very best night. But even these performances are never mired in the wink-wink-nudge- nudge of condescension to either Shakespeare or the audience. As Donnellan and Ormerod proved in their version of Angels in America at the National Theatre, no play is so weighted down by metaphor or message that it cannot be made to sing and soar...
...Millburn never had a very good team," she says. "Part of his charm was that he wanted to be a football player, and he practiced and practiced and practiced...