Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trio of actresses at the center of the narrative. Mitchell has the largest role, and she nicely manages the role of the seeming innocent drawn so far into this circle of sirens that her presence creates tensions felt by the whole group. Clarkson impresses mightily as Greta, whose mordant wit is an obvious retort to a life and a lover she feels have abandoned...
...impasto of alliterative adjectives got slathered onto public men. George Bernard Shaw was "mocking, mordant, misanthropic." General Erich von Ludendorff was "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." The intent was novelistic. As Luce explained it, "No idea exists outside a human skull--and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice--in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality. TIME journalism began by being deeply interested in people, as individuals who were making history, or a small part of it, from week to week. We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell...
Whitehead has a reputation for following his own path. By the standards of the religious right, he qualifies as a bit of a cultural maverick. (His taste in music runs to the only-sometimes-spiritual U2 and the intricately ironic Beck. His favorite artist is the mordant British painter Francis Bacon.) Although the institute has never taken up a sexual-harassment case before, he says he accepted this one because it was a "human-rights issue." And because "I think she's telling the truth...
...President of the United States cannot resist, in dramatic televised addresses, making pointed reference to their latest bereavement. This is an age in which the Vice President, in consecutive convention speeches, makes lachrymose use, first, of a son's accident, then of a sister's death. (Noted one mordant wit: At this rate, his wife had better not walk near any plateglass windows.) In such an age, we can use the example of a man who through four presidential terms dealt with the agony of a nation while keeping his own agonies to himself...
...John Wayne's America (Simon & Schuster; 380 pages; $26) Garry Wills imagines that this must tell us something about the soul of postmodern America. And perhaps it does. But by the end of his confused and digressive meditation, this usually mordant cultural historian looks rather like a second heavy in a Wayne western--rubbing his jaw and spitting dust as the Duke's shade strides off toward the horizon, as impervious to academic analysis as he was to a bad man's six-shooter...