Word: instrument
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...main question facing the board is how a small department, with headquarters in the White House and operating with a budget of only $4 million, could run so dangerously amuck. The answer seems to be that it offered everything Reagan wanted as an instrument of policy. The NSC is protected by Executive privilege, immune to congressional oversight, secretive and small enough to be virtually leakproof. Though the NSC has enjoyed high influence in previous Administrations, the agency has rarely attained the degree of autonomy that it has under Ronald Reagan. But critics charge that the NSC has been playing outside...
...easy enough to pick out the ringers, the professionals, in the choir. In the instant before she sings, Carole FitzPatrick, the lead soprano, sits forward and seems to assemble herself into a musical instrument, spine straightening, chest swelling, head lifting and tilting back. When the volunteers mumble through the first reading, she growls, sotto voce, "Come on, girls, sing!" "I was singing," comes the lament. The volunteers regroup to one side of their leader, for strength in numbers. They start to open up and "honk it," as FitzPatrick indelicately urges on the third...
...where Billy has fallen a wee bit behind in paying the bills. After this rude assault, Ellen has an insight about her corporeal self and that of women in general: "A Female Body is not just a piece of liver from the butcher . . . It is more like a musical instrument made of flesh and blood that has music waiting inside it but only for properly trained hands to coax out. Make the bastards learn...
...instrument for this was color, betokening light. Nice gave him a different light from Paris -- a high, constant effulgence with little gray in it, flooding broadly across sea, city and hills, producing luminous shadows and clear tonal structures. It encouraged Matisse to think of space (in particular, the space of the hotel rooms where he worked overlooking the Promenade des Anglais) as a light-filled box, full of reflections, transparencies and openings. Shutters filter the light, and their bars are echoed in the stripes of awnings or rugs; light is doubled by mirrors that break open the space...
There it was again: the call, not for endless fiddling with the process and imagery, but for men and women who can harness the Democrats and unite them as an instrument of positive vision. In short, the Democrats, with their majorities in Congress and the statehouses, must put up or shut up if they intend to capture the future. Hammering at the failures of Ronald Reagan will not be enough...