Word: genteel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rock is in its second childhood. Senility is not pending, but familiarity certainly is, as rock's raffishness gets currycombed by nostalgia, spiffed up and repackaged for more genteel consumption. The musical past is being reprocessed, in all sorts of unlikely places, from shopping malls to concert stages. A second generation is starting to catch the beat of the music their parents grew up with, the music that, very often, helped their parents grow up. If all that is a little disorienting, or even baffling, remember the words of the classic R.-and-B. tune: "The little girls understand...
...editor of the gritty New York Post wears white linen skirts, a string of pearls and pink nail polish, and she comes from Philadelphia's genteel Main Line. Last week, after announcing the appointment of Magazine Veteran Jane Amsterdam to the top slot at one of the last bastions of no-holds-barred, spit-in-the-eye tabloid journalism, the Post's owner, Real Estate Magnate Peter Kalikow, presented her with a T shirt emblazoned with the paper's now legendary April 15, 1983, headline HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. As earthy Post newsroom veterans (uncomfortably adorned in ties...
...George Lucas designed the Star Tours ride for Disneyland, and is planning an Indiana Jones attraction, but he is only returning a big favor. Lucas' movies are essentially Disney theme-park rides transferred to film. They fit perfectly into the Disney world -- a world of high-tech thrills and genteel Americana. A monarchy of make-believe. A Neverland for the whole family...
...saga spans several generations, but Barry Sr. and his wife dominate the pages. Mary, a Southern girl poor in finances but rich in snobbish pretense, met Barry when they were students at Radcliffe and Harvard. She saw in him the perfect Kentucky gentleman who could make her dreams of genteel grandeur come true. "Like Barry," Brenner writes, "she . . . had grown up with the same hard lessons of vanquished pride, the specter of Civil War memorials, geriatric veterans invited for Sunday dinner, and the endless parades of cripples . . . celebrating another battle of the Lost Cause...
...author is an expert on the painting of the 18th and 19th centuries and a teacher at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. Her six previous novels include Hotel du Lac, the 1984 winner of Britain's top fiction award, the Booker Prize. Yet despite her finished style and genteel settings, she is as hard-boiled as any writer of detective fiction. Many of Brookner's principals are updatings of that familiar character, the English spinster as connoisseur of other people's behavior. Rachel is not only unattached but detached, a state that suits her analytical intelligence and chilly rectitude...