Word: dourness
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...hand grenades was impounded, and Maria and Dave lammed out just ahead of the cops. She returned to Dublin a celebrity-too much so for the taste of Sean MacStiofain, the transplanted Englishman who was then the Provisional I.R.A.'s chief of staff. Maria McGuire hated the dour, puritanical MacStiofain (who since has been replaced as the Proves' top military man). His Roman Catholic scruples would not even let him bring back from the Protestant North a box of contraceptives his men needed to make acid fuses for their bombs. In her book, the Provo leader emerges...
Long a man marked for assassination by Palestinian terrorists, Hussein insouciantly dramatized his forgiveness by sipping coffee with Daud and a few other guerrillas before their release. Outside Amman's dour Mahatta prison, in a swirling dust and under a blazing sun, hundreds of Palestinian refugees and sympathizers danced to the lilting music of a shepherd's flute as they waited for the first prisoners to be freed. Encouraged by television cameramen, many in the crowd chanted "Long live King Hussein...
...dour, daft family, his rages, his uncomplaining wife ("He felt a drop in her interest when she seemed certain there was nothing much in it for her but pleasure"), his keen, cold eye, his utter isolation−they all unreel as episodes unreel by the roadside, bizarre but not unexpected...
...landscape they inhabit resembles them. Dour, bare and snow-patched, with low horizons of brown hill or gray water, a wind incessantly prying at the boards of the creaky frame houses, it is the soil from which virtue is meant to grow; even the pumpkin on Wyeth's fence post, if pumpkins could vote, would have voted for Ike. "Wyeth country"-the Pennsylvania farm land around Chadds Ford, where he spends the winter, and the summer acreage in Maine-has become landscape as myth or monument by now, the American middlebrow's equivalent of Cezanne's Mont...
Schubert: Piano Sonata in A. Op. Posth. (Alfred Brendel; Philips, $6.98). A steadfastly rich, varied piece of music, less rambling than the dour ¶minor and the ethereal-and best-known-B Flat, all of which Schubert wrote in the last months of his life. Surprisingly from the suave, precise Brendel, the performance could now and then use a more expressive turn of phrase; but it is still the performance to have, at least until somebody gets around to reissuing the nonpareil Schnabel version...