Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...accusation that Marxist theoreticians are as dour as they are unintelligible, the favorite Red comeback is the case of John Strachey. Cousin of the late Lytton Strachey, heir to an English baronetcy, former M.P. who in 1931 quit the Mac-Donald coalition government to join the Reds, John Strachey is a softly athletic six-footer who lectures in tails. Smoothtongued, witty, he has made himself a favorite with middle-class lecture audiences, while his Coming Struggle for Power (1933), the first and only "Party line" bestseller, made him a reputation as the nearest thing to a popularizer of the nearly...
Little Miss Broadway (Twentieth Century-Fox) pits Shirley Temple's curls and dimples against the lengthy, dour countenance of Edna May Oliver. To win over a fitful Manhattan millionairess is child's play for Shirley, who has spent her precocious career winning over a variety of toughs, misanthropes, hard-hearted colonels and capricious sea captains...
...operator of the world's first schedule of television broadcasts for public entertainment. Therefore, last month when Sir John Reith's new appointment left BBC without a director-general, the choice of his successor was a matter of prime public interest. Britishers had come to believe that dour, resourceful Sir John was the BBC. For he had never hesitated to take on his own broad, stooped Scottish shoulders direct and total responsibility for BBC policies and moral tone...
Last week, the Government thought they had found the right man to bring Imperial Airways up to snuff. That man was starchy, six-foot-six Sir John Charles Walsham Reith, a dour, egg-headed, ascetic Aberdonian who since 1922 has had his puritanical thumb on the destinies of the British Broadcasting Corp. Son of a preacher, trained as a Clydeside engineer, he got his job with B.B.C. by the improbable method of answering a want ad for a general manager...
...Wyeth, part real-estate ad, part history, part guide book, all of it unadulterated Mainiac bragging, Trending Into Maine aims belligerently at these main points: 1) that "there are no better people anywhere in the world" than State-of-Mainers, 2) that writers who call Maine natives "dour, sour, cautious, calculating yokels," are dirty liars, and 3) that Maine voters are still the true defenders of liberty, and to hell with Roosevelt...