Word: genteel
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...contrast, Caroline Ivey's The Family is reassuring in its pedestrian normality. Novelist Ivey has turned to that familiar Southern fixture, a genteel family going gracefully to seed. Into the Olmstead household comes a Northern son-in-law, brilliant, restless and unhappy. Though he loves his wife, he cannot fit into her family or persuade her to break away from it. Why should they always be kissing and hugging, reminiscing about adolescent trivia, delighting in the vast disorder of their house, and still honoring the obsolete cult of the Southern Lady? Most of The Family is a quarrel...
Misery, it seems has had a cathartic effect on the Advocate. Buffeted and bruised by scissors-and-paste contributors and an overly-genteel printer who couldn't spell, the magazine has emerged from a bleak Winter bright in cover and content. In fact, the May issue is both balanced in material and extremely readable as well...
Through the abbey-like halls of the London Times, in the spring of 1908, ran a tremor of genteel horror. The "gentlemen scholars" who were used to running the Times as if it were a hereditary and self-perpetuating priesthood heard shocking news: the paper's control had been bought by Lord Northcliffe,* first lord of Britain's yellow press. "Ye Black Friars," as Northcliffe called them, feared the worst, and it soon came. The Times, said the new chief proprietor, might be what the "monks" called an institution, but it was not a newspaper...
...blood & thunder accompaniments of Verdi, for instance, found Vivaldi's music often "lively as gunfire," but hardly theatrical. Holofernes got his head lopped off in a few bars of refined fiddling-where Verdi would have unleashed all the brass and tympani in the pit. And Judith was always genteel, a decapitator in old lace. Sung in Latin, the vocal lines were always elegant, sometimes floridly difficult...
...word must be said about the present Boston production. The individual parts seem particularly easy to act, because of the moderate, genteel simplicity of the verse writing. Dennis King, as the psychiatrist, and Estelle Winwood, as the old gossip, gave especially distinguished performances. The only actor who was patently inadequate was Harry Ellerbe, who did not bring enough solidity and urbanity to his portrayal of the distraught husband...