Word: mordant
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...clearing it first with his chief of state, President Georges Pompidou. A graduate of France's prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Jobert was a gifted civil servant who joined forces with Pompidou ten years ago as one of his top aides. Short and slight, he has a mordant wit, and his intellectual powers command the respect of Cabinet colleagues...
...Bergman. But the movie's greatest debt is not to the preceding era's prestigious portraits of European decadence but to the laws of the universe--the ways of the world--as the porno movie sees them. Ferreri's is a porn epic in the grand manner, a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie that, for sheer audacious lubricity, out-tangoes "Last Tango in Paris" and almost gives the devilish Miss Jones a run for her money...
...Musil demonstrated in his mammoth novel A Man Without Qualities, it was also the most exciting intellectual center in Europe. There were Mach and Boltzman in physics, Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Adler and Freud in psychology. There were also dozens of writers and journalists, including the brilliant, mordant social critic Karl Kraus, whose anti-paper Die Fackel (The Torch) was dedicated to making its readers "morally aware of the essential distinction between the chamber...
First comes fury (Look Back in Anger) and then mordant self-pity (In admissible Evidence). If these assaults on man's conscience do not take effect, what is left but to call it quits? That is not precisely what Playwright John Osborne has done in his new London play A Sense of Detachment (his kind never quits). It is only that, having failed with passion and rational argument to persuade us to open our eyes and ears and hearts, Osborne now resorts to the figurative pig bladder and slapstick. He never totally succeeds (his kind never does...
...sinister drama, the Mafia's bloodletting accounts for only an insignificant fraction of the killings that occur every year in the U.S. The rising toll sometimes seems to validate H. Rap Brown's mordant dictum: "Violence is as American as cherry pie." In 1970 there were 16,000 criminal homicides in the nation-one every 33 minutes. With the carnage mounting-up 8% from the previous year and 76% over the decade-the U.S. is maintaining its long-held, unhappy distinction of leading advanced Western nations in the rate at which its citizens destroy one another. Philadelphia...