Word: genteel
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Ugly American. It is an unpressing, genteel project that barely disguises the truth: Adams does not know where his life is going, and he does not much care for anything. It is a truth that is all the more painful because he is forced to face it by a man whom he feels is his inferior in every way. Frederick Giles of Winnebago Terrace, Ill., graduate of Kansas State and World War II veteran who wears an American flag tie clasp, is also staying at the Rufus Arms. He would be everyone's idea of a silent American, except...
...these tales share a kindred urbanity, as might be expected from a longtime contributor of fiction and criticism to The New Yorker. (Gill's present post there is Broadway theater critic.) Many of the characters-clubmen, wealthy matrons, genteel spinsters -could well be the literary grandchildren of Edith Wharton's characters. Gill's narrative voice evokes the kind of man who might be found in one of his own fictional clubs or parlors-a wryly observant uncle or older brother who has moved in wide enough circles to be able to recount a homosexual killing...
...course I will never forget that morning at dawn, when hundreds of policemen and their clubs, overseen by that cold man watching from his mansion with binoculars, taught us what power the University commanded behind its shabby-genteel facade of sherry-sipping rationality--and on which side that cruel power would be exercised...
...truly monumental drinking bouts, which friends and relatives learned to predict. Whenever he began reciting Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a siege of gin and bourbon was imminent. The author's domestic life was a Faulknerian blend of the Gothic and the genteel. In 1918, his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham wed someone else. Faulkner waited. After ten years her marriage broke up, and Faulkner proposed. Their lifelong union was outwardly placid, Faulkner the proper country squire, Estelle his lady. But their mutual drinking produced nightmarish battles as dramatic though less destructive than those between Scott...
...beginning towards a different image and a different function for the Radcliffe Institute. The feeling among its staff members is that the transition from a small intimate haven for a limited number of women to a place with a broader scope is both positive and realistic. Where an elitist, genteel image once seemed to isolate the Institute from the women's movement, there are now claims that it may be in the vanguard. For the changes at the Institute also involve a redefinition of the goals women must seek: in the face of an economic recession, they...