Word: genteelism
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When Miller was growing up, the genteel tradition was in its prime: so much of America was so captive to European proprieties that it might have seemed the Revolution had been fought in vain. A writer like Henry James, for example, in transporting a nuanced country-house sensibility to England, was, almost literally, carrying coals to Newcastle; Miller, by contrast, brought to Europe things it was less accustomed to seeing: naked appetite, hopeless high spirits, French spoken with a Brooklyn accent. And what he brought back was something even richer: the great French passions -- of love and talk and food...
Tifft and Jones root the Binghams in Southern traditions, from the mythmaking of genteel poverty to the brute force of the Klan, and sidle up to intriguing questions about the morality of inheriting vast fortunes and the special duties of media owners. But the core story is the mid-1980s sale of all Bingham companies for $448 million by Barry Bingham Sr., then 79. His son and namesake unsurprisingly felt that an adult lifetime of corporate devotion entitled him to the lion's share of control. Two wayward sisters, whom Barry Jr. had disenfranchised, equally unsurprisingly felt entitled to more...
...unlikely, though, that they signal a return to Hollywood's golden age, when Garbo, Davis, Hepburn, Crawford, Dietrich could sell a film and give it class. That was a more genteel time, one that prized wit, heart and, on screen at least, a sexual equality of emotion and intelligence. Movies were about grownups; the toy-boy heroes stayed in comic books. Maybe audiences were more mature too. These days, Ghost and Pretty Woman are the big-hit exception, not the norm; moviegoers tend to measure heroism in terms of pectorals. Somewhere ! between Rambo and bimbo, between roles for children...
Some Tories in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham staged a rebellion when | they discovered that the candidate designated to run in the next general election is black. A local party member, Bill Galbraith, reportedly described nominee John Taylor, 38, a lawyer and a former government adviser on race relations, as "a bloody nigger." Others claimed that the nomination had been "bulldozed" through by a national party eager to elect its first nonwhite representative since...
...liberals who had hoped to retire the Senate's most outspoken reactionary, the result was a harsh disappointment. Gantt in early fall appeared to capture the initiative. A former mayor of Charlotte and a successful architect, Gantt, 47, presented what he called a "noble agenda." It amounted to a genteel strain of liberalism emphasizing improved education, health care and environmental measures. He rarely used the terms black or African American and refused to call Helms racist. Instead, he labeled Helms "divisive," a euphemism Gantt hoped would deflect polarization along racial lines...