Word: lesser
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Adam Winthrop and, to a lesser extent, the other Winthrops in the book are in fact the author himself, thinly veiled. The contractual sense of mission dominates the book as it does Auchin-closs's life. Related both by marriage and blood to the Winthrop family, trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leader in the Century Club and the Downtown Association, Auchincloss prides himself on being an arbiter elegantiarum. So it is with authority that he writes about his Winthrop kinsmen, worthy judges of men and manners of their own times...
...John Campbell Butman to forswear innovation, since whatever happens on stage will be new. Butman also abandons much of the elaborate stylization which shaped the performances in this fall's production of Iolanthe, encouraging his leads to act with greater naturalism and leaving the contorting and caricaturing to the lesser characters...
...N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund's long war against executions, contended that even if the new laws require neutral enforcement of the death penalty there is inevitably "play" in the system. Prosecutors, for example, can always decide against bringing a capital charge and juries can convict for a lesser offense. This "elaborate winnowing process," said Amsterdam, means that only an arbitrarily selected few are sentenced to death...
...view in the working experience of other mandatory sentencing laws. In 1970, first-degree murder in Pennsylvania carried a mandatory punishment of life imprisonment, but a team of researchers, led by University of Chicago Law Professor Franklin Zimring, reports in a forthcoming study that plea bargaining and lesser charges were regularly used to evade the law's intent, suggesting to the authors "that legislation prescribing mandatory capital punishment for premeditated or felony-murder would not be mandatory in effect." Supporters of mandatory executions answer that the new capital punishment laws do as well as is humanly and systemically possible...
Wilson often suggested that he never expected to rise to Churchillian heights. "I'm the lesser of two evils," he once said of himself and the Tories. Measured by his own modest standards, he did not do all that badly for his country. While he failed to inspire, he at least proved that Britain was still governable. It was, after all, barely more than a year ago that some British rightists were muttering about fielding private armies to take on the unions, and even the staid London Times was wondering whether this was Britain's "last-chance Parliament...