Word: cloistral
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...well. Deborah Kerr played a nun in Black Narcissus ; Robert Mitchum has done no fewer than four tours of duty as a cinema serviceman. Under Huston's sharp eye, they both give good standard performances. Actress Kerr, whose makeup man went a bit too far with the cloistral pallor, sometimes looks as if she had cut her veins as well as her hair; but Actor Mitchum, even though as usual he does nothing but slob around the screen, has succeeded for once in carrying off his slobbing with significance...
...circumscribed foreground space, there is a cloistral hush that is completely monastic. The half-genuflecting angel, splendid with great, backswept polychrome wings and raised hand, recites the sentence inscribed in gold from St. Luke: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee." The Virgin, in a gesture of untroubled acceptance, replies simply: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word...
Most university presidents, secure in the cloistral detachment of their office, let their dignity fatten in silence, and save their wind for civic holidays, feasts of the church and times of national disaster. Magazine editors, moved by a similar but perhaps sincerer humility, often preserve the newspaper tradition of anonymity. But when a man achieves great eminence he shatters these conventions even as a growing lad might burst by stout activity the short breeches that fitted him so well a year before. So it is with Glenn Frank, onetime editor of the Century, newly chosen president of the University...
...brings up defined notions of what these institutions stand for and the quality of their human product. Harvard for a number of years, has been thought of definitely as a university not exactly bloodless, but at least less boisterous than some of its neighbors. It has been regarded as cloistral, its vigor somewhat stifled by--er--snobbishness...
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