Word: florid
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Phillips' career testified to the truth of Dostoevsky's remark that "an aristocrat is irresistible when he goes in for democracy." He risked his life repeatedly, faced mobs with the hauteur of a nobleman awaiting the guillotine, and dissipated his fortune in charities. In an age of florid oratory he stirred his listeners with a lean, precise, deadly effective style. When Emerson heard him, he felt as if "the whole air was full of splendors." A Virginia paper called him "an infernal machine set to music...
...florid man who looked almost too handsome to be able, Hap Arnold hated to admit there was anything the Air Forces couldn't do. In his expansive vocabulary, U.S. bombers and fighters were always without peer, U.S. pilots "the cream of the world's manhood." His prophecies frequently had the wild, heady ring of the visionary, but more often than not, events proved him right...
...acting in a DeMille picture bears about the same relation to ordinary acting that a DeMille spectacle bears to everyday life. Holding up the florid tradition of black-hearted villainy are George Sanders and Henry Wilcoxon. Mature is suitably curly-haired and big-muscled as Samson. For all her plumage, including a gown of 2,000 peacock feathers (which DeMille ordered retouched for more color), Miss Lamarr's slitherings suggest a small-town belle making like a femme fatale...
...folk tales are the most valuable part of [his work] ... He is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm." Many readers will cast their votes in favor of the blunt, naturalistic American Sketches, where Author Hearn's florid prose frames some breathtaking sights in19th Century Cincinnati's Sausage Row and the New Orleans voodoo belt...
...text of The Little Foxes that Regina has altered: the storyline scarcely varies an inch. It is the tone. With its sharp claws and ruthless clawing, its treacherous wiles and wheelchair theatrics, The Little Foxes might have yielded something inordinately operatic. But though his big scenes are sometimes florid enough, Composer Blitzstein's version of the Alabama Hubbards is fundamentally comic. Regina much less suggests a social critic excoriating an emerging class of plunderers than a first-rate showman exhibiting a prize assortment of hellions. Blitzstein's Hubbards cavort the whole time they conspire, and the general effect...