Word: dour
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...first year of T.V.'s life, his father's great friend, a dour little local doctor named Sun Yatsen, performed a historic act. He sent a petition, as was the right of every queued Manchu subject, to the viceroy of the Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi -to grant China western reforms...
...Republican Opposition. "Carthage must be destroyed," cried the dour elder Cato in speech after speech in the Roman Senate. Perhaps it was inevitable that Rome should wipe out its great rival for control of the west Mediterranean basin. But once the Carthaginian menace had been removed, a certain vital tension disappeared from Rome's internal life. With no immediately compelling external problem, Romans started fighting each other...
...such richly colorful material, woven into a narrative that is never schematic, and yet never a mere miscellaneous grab bag of historical information, is Van Wyck Brooks's book constructed. Its individual word-portraits-of Alexander Wilson, the dour ornithologist and bird-painter, of Davy Crockett, teller of tall backwoods tales, who thought they made a book "jump out of the press like a new dollar from a mint-hopper," of Fenimore Cooper, whose father gave him 23 farms in New York State when the future novelist was expelled from Yale-are equal to Brooks's best...
...chief of the U.S. Army Ground Forces, Lieut. General Lesley James McNair had whipped millions of civilians into the greatest Army in the nation's history. A skeptical, gently dour little professional, "Whitey" McNair had done it without raising his voice, and with rare recourse to his considerable vocabulary of caustic profanity...
Margery, barmaid to the House of Commons, poured a double Scotch for dour, flushed parliamentary Labor Party Boss Arthur Greenwood. Sipping, he sighed: "That blasted bill! Ehh, what a life...