Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Royal Mile. On opening day, the clear, crisp morning air throbbed with the wail of bagpipers from the grounds of Edinburgh Castle. By midafternoon, spectators had jammed the "Royal Mile" between Holyrood Palace and Edinburgh Castle to watch the ceremonial parade to dour St. Giles's Cathedral, led by the Lord Lyon King of Arms, in heraldic tabard, looking as if he had stepped off a playing card. In the cavernous cathedral, with a blast of trumpets, the festival was formally opened-a festival that would hear, before it was over, some 1,500 musicians, including seven orchestras, four...
Bridie was the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic serving-girl mother. In border County Fermanagh, that was enough to brand her. When Bridie was orphaned, she was disowned by her father's Protestant family and brought up by her mother's sister, a dour, devout Catholic. Aunt Rose Anne instilled the fear of God in Bridie, a shy, spritelike creature who loved to run wild on the bog, disliked school and was passionately fond of easygoing Uncle James. When Uncle James died, Aunt Rose Anne went to work at the convent and Bridie hired...
...would still have been a greater innovator than Jean Sibelius, now 82, and Richard Strauss, 84, both of whom barely got into the century musically. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are both deep in Stravinsky's debt. Only one other living composer seriously challenges him as a contemporary influence: dour, 73-year-old Arnold Schönberg, spiritual leader of the atonalists, whose theoretical contributions are great, though his output is small...
...more room, served simultaneously as carriers, leaders, patrollers, defenders against aircraft-and hazards to smaller craft. Turning and twisting at high speed to avoid bombs, their roaring wash flooded or capsized scores of loaded dinghies, launches, yachts. Collision in the dark, too, "was a great worry," reported Mr. Lowe, dour skipper of the tug Simla...
...Dour General Zaragoza had never expected such folly. There was just time to open fire with the fortress' guns, and to move the infantry to the top of the hill. As the red-bloomered French Zouaves charged smartly up the slope, the barefooted Indians mowed them down with 1812 muskets. Then machete-waving cavalrymen, led by a young Mixtec Indian named Porfirio Diaz, rushed in from the flanks, and the veterans of Sevastopol and Solferino knew that they were beaten. Leaving 1,000 dead, Lorencez began his retreat toward the Gulf...