Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...symbol of the mauve decadence. Its décor was the most glittery, its women the most ravishing, its top-drawer scandals the most toothsome. No Manhattan nightclub captain was ever so suave or tactful as Maxim's famed, monocled Chasseur Gérard, who, with a handy grasp of the Almanach de Gotha unsurpassed by any dowager in Europe, discreetly arranged introductions between the world's great ones and Maxim's incomparable ladies of the evening...
...Russia's first grasp for tighter government power was blocked when the U.S. and Britain threatened not to recognize the Rumanian government if elections were rigged. Last week, after a long period of careful preparation, electoral lists were once more announced. Result: dithyrambic cries of foul play from aging (73) National Peasant Party Leader Juliu Maniu and National Liberal Party Leader Constantin Bratianu. They claimed that the lists had been drawn up in such a way as to favor the Soviet-supported candidates. While tension grew between the government and these two big opposition parties, the government itself threatened...
Author Jackson has a plausible clinical grasp of the excruciating predicament of these people, and he prepares his revelation with conscientious care. But the book is not remotely comparable to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a calm, classic, immensely artful treatment of a similar theme...
...Houston Hall, the 150-man House of Bishops sat in maple chairs before rough little tables-an impressive phalanx of white hair, black clothes and informal dignity. Into their hands last week was put the nettle of Episcopal-Presbyterian union. The lower House of Deputies had refused to grasp it, instead had gingerly pushed it aside by voting: 1) to keep for another three years the Joint Commission on Unity, and request it to draft a new basis of union; 2) to ask the Presbyterians to produce a similar document; 3) to call for a standing commission on Church Unity...
Author Cecil considers Hardy "the last English writer to be built on the grand Shakespearean scale." Readers, argues Cecil, may be overcritical of Hardy's often cumbersome, melodramatic writing if they fail to grasp that his work was modeled on the Elizabethan drama-on the wild and stormy tragedy of King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi rather than on he carefully constructed novel form of a Tolstoy or a Jane Austen. They may also become impatient with his pessimism if they do not realize that, unlike his great Elizabethan predecessors, Hardy was a reluctant atheist...