Word: disdain
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...then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford are "provincial and mean and common...
...hopping mad with Washington has been obvious for some time now. In a speech in Munich last July, he lambasted the U.S. for its "unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions," claiming that "the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way" and slamming its "greater and greater disdain" for international law. Enraged by U.S. moves to station a missile defense system on his doorstep, Putin withdrew Russia from a Cold War-era treaty governing the size of conventional military forces in Europe, and ordered its old turbo-prop Bear bombers out of mothballs to fly nuclear patrols along...
...they instinctively experience it as more of a barrier and a frontier than a highway: "They pass over it hurriedly; they try not to walk beside it, and they rarely venture upon it." Aware or not, Londoners are heirs to a centuries-old, north-south crossflow of envy and disdain. In 1840 the journalist Charles Mackay disparaged south Londoners by writing that "the progress of civilisation does nothing for them ... a thousand years effect nothing more than to change the wigwam into a hovel...
...others sometimes inflected the same sentence for maximum disdain: "The President of the United States has the time to write ... you?" Whether this is meant as a criticism of the President or as a criticism of me, I'm never able to tell. Both, I suspect...
President George W. Bush and his French counterpart bonded over burgers last Saturday, after President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped by the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. There was no mistaking the sharp contrast in atmospherics in comparison to the mutual disdain that Presidents Bush and Jacques Chirac reserved for one another. But while hopes are up for a less fraught relationship between Paris and Washington, the feel-good manner in which the two men have agreed to disagree on international affairs may not prevent those differences from sparking new trans-Atlantic tensions when it comes to the crunch...