Word: confirm
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...Supreme Vice. Wilde was a talker, one of the best who ever lived, and perhaps because he needed the stimulus of conversation, his letters were not so witty as his talk. Rather, the letters confirm Pearson's estimate of Wilde as a man utterly without meanness of spirit, the kindest and most gracious of egomaniacs. Constantly he is seen doing a kindness, praising another author, gracefully laughing off an insult. His own wit, unlike that of his artist friend Whistler, almost never dealt in insults (except when he was insulting Whistler; Wilde observed in one letter that Whistler...
...next 87 minutes, without waiting for the doctor to confirm or deny the prediction, the poor little canary flutters in terror through the streets of Paris, pursued by the big black cat of Death. She flutters past a market, where carcasses of cattle hang from brutal hooks and the butchers inspect her expertly, as though she were a carcass too. She flutters to her manager (Dominique Davray), a hard-faced businesswoman who comforts her meticulously but unemotionally, as though smoothing a 500-franc note. She flies back to her gilded cage in time to preen and twitter...
...After a quick look at photographs of Princess Margaret and Husband Tony taken during her 32nd birthday party in Abbeyleix, Ireland last week. London's Daily Mirror assumed that she was, bannered: ANOTHER BABY FOR MARGARET. The princess' press officer, besieged by queries, refused to confirm or deny the story. "I simply don't know," he muttered. "To ask the princess herself would be impertinent...
Merely a Prelude. In Before My Time Tucci suggests (and his publishers confirm) that the book is merely a prelude to a series of autobiographical novels. But Tucci takes far too long to make his biographical points. Again and again he shows the same characters playing the same emotional parts: the domineering old woman, the haplessly childish daughter, the faintly struggling son-in-law. Each family anecdote would make a good (if somewhat bloated) New Yorker sketch. But, because only members of a family have limitless interest in family idiosyncrasies, the sum of Before My Time is interminably less than...
...clerics who are also squires), long words (honorificabilitudinity, meaning merely "honor"), and grim words (heresy originally meant merely "private opinion," and in the shift of meaning to "private, sinful error" can be read a whole history of religious persecution). Sometimes he errs; the grisly U.S. neologism "finalize" means to confirm a tentative decision-not to finish. But the book is delightful, and to say more of its faults would be to make mountains of oontitoompses (Gloucestershire rural slang for molehills...