Word: genteel
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...twist on the old-fashioned Broadway-style comedy. It begins with a group grope and ends with a kiss. It is underscored with dreamy, pertinent Gershwin songs (Fascinating Rhythm, Embraceable You, They Can't Take That Away from Me). And it considers, with a wisdom born of irreverence, a genteel old dilemma. Until the pill, a threat of pregnancy ; loomed over any nice young man who considered having sex with someone he loved. Now especially for gay men, the threat is death. "Sex wasn't meant to be 'safe,' " Jeffrey says. "Or negotiated. Or fatal." But there's no sense...
...school as by ethnic and family background. Connections are not unimportant. Jack, Ben's best friend and the novel's narrator, is a writer for a weekly newsmagazine, a social credential so marginal that he is also given a Harvard degree, a blood tie to the Alsops and a genteel avocation of writing a book about the Indians of Maine...
...monuments invested with an almost classical presence. They can also seem unbendingly solemn. "I like to think I have a merry side," he says, almost wistfully, and in conversation he certainly talks often of "fun," his sonorous voice rolling up and down with command and theatricality, now mimicking a genteel old lady, now a Taoist sage. "I've never in my life -- or hardly ever -- laughed so loud as during the creation of my fiction," he says, while acknowledging that his humor may be too laconic for some tastes. At the same time, he remains unflinchingly serious in his determination...
...19th century, when conventional wisdom foresaw ever greater prosperity and ease. Jules Verne invented science fiction in the 1860s with his tales of space flight and submarine voyage, and the American Edward Bellamy, in his widely read 1888 novel Looking Backward, imagined Boston around the year 2000 as a genteel Utopia where everyone enjoys equal pay and crime has all but disappeared...
Royalty and privilege are threatened. So too is a genteel culture represented by Sir William, British envoy to the decadent Neapolitan court. A collector of antiquities and an amateur scientist, he occasions Sontag's heavier musings. Unfortunately, he is too underpowered to be the principal vehicle in a historical tour de force. Making a cameo appearance, Goethe dismisses him as "a simple-minded epicurean...