Word: downrightness
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...Downright Men. But if the Dutch artists were wonderfully downright about their everyday world, they reflected a Dutch Protestant reluctance to accept sacred subjects and they avoided the upsetting, never-distant world of war and human suffering. Only Rembrandt had the courage to take all human life, spiritual as well as material, for his province. Rembrandt overshadowed last week's exhibition, and also dominated its pendant show of Dutch prints and drawings. Rembrandt's etching Faust (above) asserts a force of imagination foreign to his environment. With such pictures, Rembrandt outstripped even the glorious age into which...
...modern official, says Sir Ernest, has built up a weird way of writing. At his worst, he is downright incomprehensible ("Prices are basis prices per ton for the representative-basis-pricing specification and size and quantity"). But even at his best, he is often fuzzy. There is, says Sir Ernest, "an unwillingness to venture outside a small vocabulary of shapeless bundles of uncertain content-words like position, arise, involve, in connection with, issue, consideration, and factor-a disposition, for instance, to 'admit with regret the position which has arisen in connection with,' rather than to make the effort...
...China from the Security Council, he suggested helpfully, and admit Red China to the Assembly. And then after a while, Red China could be moved up to the Council. Khrushchev became very angry. China was not a "beggar," he snapped, but a great nation seeking its rights. "A very downright person," Attlee pronounced...
...hour. Gist of his statement: he had defected to the Communists because "the Nazis and the militarists in West Germany are again in power" and "the Bonn-Paris axis is only a tool of the Americans." Americans, he said he had learned on his recent visit to Washington, are "downright hysterically mad in fear of Communism...
...believe," says he, "that I am not going too far in saying that [U.S.] education at the high-school level is mediocre. The fault does not lie with the teaching staff. The tenets of democratic egalitarianism are so strong in the United States that they assume a downright metaphysical importance. The postulate goes this way: All minds must have an equal chance at the start. They are like fertile fields; all that needs to be done is to sow them with method and prevent their differences from growing more marked, since differences contradict the principle of fundamental equality...