Word: donnish
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Boring & Sound. The pale young man with the donnish air was no overnight success. His speeches-meticulously prepared, subtly reasoned, peppered with quiet wit-bored the House. But the ability to bore is rather well regarded in the House of Commons as a sign of soundness. Rab turned from oratory to committee and administrative work to prove his soundness. He was cautious, he was courteous, he never spoke out of turn, he never spoke unless well prepared. His voice was as clear as his logic. "The bullyboys may make the headlines," said a colleague, "but it is to the young...
Britain's Acting Prime Minister Richard A. Butler stood up in the House of Commons one day last week and, for all his determination not to, twanged the bowstring of Britain's royal romance. The Churchill government, announced the dry, donnish Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposes to change the law which designates Princess Margaret as regent should her sister the Queen die before Prince Charles...
...idea of a sort of highborn Oxford, circa 1900, fits the play's alfresco gaieties, elaborate forms, donnish humor and prankish but decorous lovemaking. In individual roles, such players as Joseph Schildkraut and Philip Bourneuf enliven the proceedings. The speeches at times are blurred, but the play's peculiarly Shakespearean finale, with its melancholy charm, is beautifully achieved. Says one of the lovers...
...human race for the next million years. Such a man is Charles Galton Darwin, 65, grandson of the late great Charles Robert (The Origin of Species) Darwin, and former Master of Christ College, Cambridge. His just-published book, The Next Million Years (Doubleday; $2.75), is sugar-coated with flowing, donnish English, but it contains a bitter pill for people with faith in human progress. The ultimate future of the race, says Writer Darwin, will be much like its deplorable past...
Upstairs & Downstairs. In a parliamentary committee room where Labor leaders faced the rebel, Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell put aside his donnish suavity for a hard go at Nye Bevan. "He hit me hard," said Gaitskell, "so I'm going to hit him back." Though many members sympathized with Bevan's argument that rearmament should not lower Britain's standard of living, they were angered by his threat to split the Labor Party. Under pressure, Bevan finally went along with his colleagues in a pledge not to take part in any action likely to endanger party...