Word: conceitedly
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...wonder there is fear and anger in Moscow, particularly among Gorbachevites. They believe no Kremlin leader can afford to give up Soviet power, not to mention Soviet territory. Many American officials share this concern, although they must be careful about saying so. In a conceit of diplomatic formalism that until recently seemed quaint and futile, the U.S. Government has never recognized the legality of the Baltic annexation. Support for human and civil rights is, or is certainly supposed to be, a constant of American foreign policy...
...fathered a son. (That union ended in divorce in 1987; Rushdie is now married to the American author Marianne Wiggins.) His first novel, Grimus (1974), was a critical and commercial flop, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit: that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction, and sold roughly half a million copies worldwide...
...great size of the baby boom generation also encouraged a sort of subliminal illusion. When time flows from father to son, from past through present into future, the generations have their orderly procession, proceeding vertically through time. But it was a metaphysical conceit of the baby boomers that the present expanded horizontally, into a kind of earthly eternity. "We want the world, and we want it now!" In the great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo-profundities...
Many of these problems did not start with the Reagan Administration. And though the national conceit puts the presidency at the center of our political solar system, no President can shine so brightly that every shadow disappears. Reagan's failure was to deny frequently that the shadows existed. While incumbency rounded out some of his early one-dimensional ideas, Reagan clung tenaciously to his phobias concerning Government intervention and federal taxes. Even Bush has had to acknowledge that Washington must act more vigorously in some areas, but Reagan to the end fought that reality. In one of his several farewell...
Onstage, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, was elegant and epicene. Les Lay caught the novel's central conceit -- that sex is a wicked game, the rankest form of show business -- in a witty talkathon on Topic A. The movie goes one crucial step further, allowing the characters to shrug off their finery and display some redeeming prurient interest. The actresses are all wanly handsome: ornaments of an era close to exhaustion. Pfeiffer and Thurman make for luscious bookends in the library of lust. Close sits back and plays the puppeteer...