Word: dourness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...ghost is Murdoch Glourie (Robert Donat), a frivolous young shade whose dour father orders him to haunt Glourie Castle in Scotland as penance for an act of characteristic levity committed during the 18th Century. Packed off to fight the English, young Glourie so far disgraces his station as to be killed while hiding behind a powder keg to avoid being thrashed by members of the rival clan of MacLaggan...
...time. But the crowd which went down to the dock to bid farewell to the highest ranking U. S. officer ever to visit the Philippines and his fellow-travelers , found the gaunt face of Speaker of the House Byrns one vast crinkly mass of smiles; Representative Bertrand Snell, the dour New Yorker who leads what is left of the House Republicans, seemed positively cheerful. The fact that his mission had its serious diplomatic side, to show the Orient that the U. S. eagle still has a protective wing over the Philippines,* was not evident in irrepressibly democratic Mr. Garner...
...Senate, whose seats are filled by the grey-bearded 'personages,' is addressed [by Mussolini] with the gravity of an elder statesman; the Chamber with tempestuous fervor, and 'high inspiration' and humor. The peasants he salutes in the style of a peasant, harsh, dour, and as the journalists say 'honest!' . . . He does not promise them that the State will make their fortunes, but that, if they work the State will do what it can to help them. . . . The peasants, I think, do not show displeasure when they refer to him as un furbo...
With jackals and hyenas howling outside the Royal Palace at Addis Ababa last week, a jovial Englishman with the fat chaps of John Bull and a dour Maine Yankee worked furiously in secret. They were writing up something in English, something so important that no one Ethiopian scribe got a look at the whole thing. By the Emperor's command the English sheets were scrambled and handed out of order to different Ethiopian translators, all vowed to secrecy...
Early last week, a tall dour man with dark glasses appeared at Dr. Bauer's Ann Arbor hotel, asked him for a lift in his automobile, forced Dr. Bauer to drive to a lonely Chicago alley. There the stranger bound Dr. Bauer's feet & hands, deliberately castrated him with a penknife. Driving the car slowly into a Chicago garage, the tall, dour man jumped out, fled into darkness. In the car the garagemen found Dr. Bauer bleeding to death...