Word: gruff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...guard of honor of ten U.S., ten British, ten French soldiers snapped to attention for the Germans. Waiting in a drawing room were the high commissioners: the U.S.'s cagey, hard-driving John J. McCloy, France's scholarly, elegant André Francois-Poncet, Britain's shy, gruff General Sir Brian Robertson. Facing the commissioners across a red carpet, Adenauer announced formally that he had formed his government. In a brief speech he paid tribute to the Allies' help to Germany, expressed the hope that Germany would soon get greater autonomy...
Negligible Bit. The hardest wallops came in the Sunday Times from a critic Britons have heard for 45 years. Gruff old (80) Ernest Newman first wanted to know "What is a festival's work?" Is its virtue, he asked, "a quality inherent in it" or does its virtue come "merely from the fact that on a particular day [a piece] is performed some hundreds of miles from where we live...
...want to paint a tree," gruff Sir Alfred had snorted at a recent R.A. banquet, "for heaven's sake make it look like a tree!" Matisse's La Forêt (in London's Tate Gallery) did not look a bit like trees to Sir Alfred. Argued Matisse, why should it? Such "material truth," he said, might as well be left to photography. The truth modern painters like himself are after is something else again; it "comes out of the mind of the artist . . . the sentiment of an artist moved by the spectacle of nature...
...Washington correspondent for 16 years before he went to the White House, Early sacrificed a $25,000 job as vice president of Pullman Inc. to take $12,000 as Johnson's top hand. Gruff and imperious, but well-liked, Steve Early could enforce Johnson's ban on competitive publicity stunts by the services, do much to win the boss a good press. Moreover, Early had once given his old friend Johnson the best advice of his life. When Roosevelt broke his promise to Johnson and appointed Republican Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War in 1940, Johnson went...
...also a man who is easily the most interesting ruler the country has known since mad King Ludwig II. He is Murray D. van Wagoner, onetime Michigan state commissioner of roads, onetime governor of Michigan, today governor of Bavaria. A portly, ruddy-faced man with a kind of gruff charm, Van Wagoner engages in no such lunacies as Ludwig, who built bizarre stone castles all over Bavaria, and ended his life by jumping into a lake. Van Wagoner's castles are all built...