Word: genteel
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Consider the plot of Tea Party, a one-acter that, along with The Basement, is being offered off-Broadway. The central figure is Sisson (David Ford), a middleaged, successful British manufacturer of bidets. A self-made man, he prizes decisiveness, precision, strength of character. A widower, he marries a genteel second wife (June Emery) and hires a miniskirted, sexually provocative secretary (Valerie French) in the same week. He invites his wife's brother (John Tillinger) into the firm. His wife becomes her brother's secretary, and the pair indulge in faintly incestuous reminiscences of days on a gracious...
Spurious Liberalism. He was born to a genteel family in post-Civil War Kentucky. His mother, he recalls, "had been brought up, like all Southern girls of her class, to do nothing," and he himself was raised "in the shadow of the Lost Cause." Admits Krock: "I looked upon the Confederate veterans as my boyhood heroes." Thus, although he considers himself a "Democratic liberal," he has been increasingly horrified at "the men and events that have reshaped our political system for the worse in the name of a 'liberalism' both spurious of ancestry and destructive in practice...
...that he is mellow, fulfilled and nearing 80, Conrad Richter is devoting his fiction more and more to recollections of the kind hearts and sometimes genteel people who lived in the town where he grew up, Pine Grove, Pa. (pop. 2,267). He has written three books about the mores of "Unionville, Pa.," Pine Grove's fictional counterpart, and they are, for the most part, splendidly solid. His latest, alas, is not. The Aristocrat is slender and seemingly self-indulgent. It would be slick as well, were it not for Richter's imperturbable sincerity. He presents a caricature...
Paradoxically, however, the NRP must be affronted by the implications of all this black humor. Of course, Burgess has long since gone beyond the anti-philistinism in vogue a generation ago. The targets of his satire are not bankers or genteel folks or even working-class reactionaries. He occasionally slips and lambastes tourists, drug visionaries, religionists, or minor literati, but these stabs are part of that flashy knife play that is little more than a come-on. More seriously, he does not bewail alienation or urbanization or sentimentality or the impossibility of communication, except tangentially. He does not decry violence...
...setting for some of the most prestigious U.S. races, including the Belmont Stakes, traditionally the third gem in the Triple Crown. But what made Belmont really special was that society's horsemen built it to their own specifications. So overwhelming was the track's mood of genteel opulence that it even awed the $2 bettors: Belmont's race crowds have always been remarkably well-behaved...