Word: malign
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...institution is not so much malign as remote. The bride-to-be has just spent six intensive weeks learning its religious rituals and ceremonies. She has already participated in one of its quainter customs. Wearing a formal silk kimono for the first time anyone could recall, she joined her parents in their living room to receive ceremonial gifts (five bolts of silk, six bottles of sake and a pair of sea bream) from the grand master of the prince's household. His highness was not present. As soon as he received word that the presents were accepted...
Although McEwan has drawn on his peers for the structure of Black Dogs, he owes much to Conrad in tone. Black Dogs conjures forth the same malign essence as Heart of Darkness. The two novels generate the same suspense, as the readers churn through the pages to reveal the secret of the one incisive encounter. The black dogs of the title fulfill the function of Kurtz, revealing for an instant the black heart of mankind, the seed of savagery we all contain. Most of all, McEwan's work reflects the powerful, emotive, and yet strangely rambling, subdued prose of Heart...
...definition of student government is an often malign representative body which has to work extra hard to win the respect of the students," said David A. Aronberg '93, outgoing council chair...
Fatherland is being compared to Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, set in the Soviet Union, another well-done, shadowed thriller about an honest cop operating within a malign bureaucracy. But Harris' narrative is more unsettling because it erodes our solid past and shows our present to be less than inevitable. His brooding, brown-and-black setting of a victorious Nazi regime is believable and troubling, the stuff of long nights of little sleep...
...Quayle has no malign racial-political intent, he might point out, when discussing the miseries of families, that, for example, Eastern prep schools are filled with children packed off to get them away from divorce, incest, alcoholism, child abuse, wife battering and other horrors at home. The willingness to let the racist implication stand unchallenged, unexamined, loitering on the threshold, is the ugliest aspect of all this...