Word: clerkish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that parliamentary speaker Rauhi Fattuh take over as President for 40 days, until elections might be held. Most top Palestinian officials believe Abbas, who resigned as Prime Minister last year after accusing Arafat of undermining his authority, would almost certainly win. Some Palestinian observers, however, questioned how long the clerkish Abbas would last if a challenge emerged later from a more ruthless opponent. The P.L.O. chiefs fear that without Arafat, the armed gangs ruling Palestinian towns wouldn't have even the modest restraining influence "the old man," as they call him, has had over them. The resulting civil unrest could...
...made film like The Whistle Blower. To be sure, the paranoia that long ago settled damply around our spy dramas seems to have drifted eastward to infect Writer Julian Bond and Director Simon Langton. Their story has the British espionage establishment protecting a highly placed mole by murdering innocent, clerkish underlings in an attempt to convince its American allies that it is doing something about a leak the latter are complaining about...
Even so, Sangster has a unique way with horses, one that combines sporting instinct with clerkish fussiness on a corporate scale. He describes it as "horribly businesslike." At the core of his operation is a first-rate staff. Irish Trainer Vincent O'Brien, 65, for instance, is one of those souls who commune with Thoroughbreds somewhere beyond speech. O'Brien's canny ways brought the team its first big season in 1977: the $200,000 stallion The Minstrel won four major European races and was syndicated at $9 million. Pat Hogan is Sangster's "salt...
...history and real-history footnotes balance and bear one another out. A remarkable one is If Not, Not, 1975-76, his meditation on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. One could hardly call it an illustration of the poem, although Eliot seems to make an appearance as the clerkish figure with spectacles and hearing aid in the lower left corner, an irritable St. Anthony tempted by a naked girl to whom he has clearly not been introduced...
...screening room has wall-to-wall carpeting. Spider plants spill down from pots hung near the windows. A poster urges lucky tourists to ski the slopes at nearby Westford. Belisle's manner is businesslike. At 35 he is already graying and his narrow face has a mournful, clerkish look. But the transactions he records in this brightly furnished office in Worcester, Mass., deal not with commerce but with cruelty. And cruelty of a kind that few people can contemplate with any measure of equanimity-the torture of small children by their parents...