Word: passional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...known, he was not a member of the Nazi Party, and his distinguished Prussian Junker family was active in the anti-Hitler resistance (a half-sister was executed by the Nazis in 1944). He is not a rabble-rouser by any means: he speaks forcefully but with little passion, devoting much of his speeches to denying charges of Nazism. When hecklers interrupt, he either rebuffs them with sarcasm or stands coolly by, purling on a cigarette, until the ruckus dies down. Occasionally, he has even given his detractors time on the rally dais...
...learning and authority on poetry and port but, alas, as if they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate-or of professional gain-naturally detest and fear a creative man of letters like Ezra Pound, to whom poetry was a passion in which the soul was engaged in mortal questions of great consequence. Sir Edmund Gosse, for instance, a pompous Edwardian booktaster of great influence and reputation, once referred to Pound as "that preposterous American filibuster and Provençal charlatan." Gosse's dislikes were cordially returned. The young Evelyn...
...then we tend to blame Harvard too much for our difficulties. For honesty's sake, a few other rituals that are hardly of Harvard's doing must be mentioned. Around New England, sex is, as they say, pursued with a passion. Every weekend, Dartmouth boys, rubbers firmly in hand, hitch out of Hanover, while Yalies go off to visit their pill-swilling neighbors. Meanwhile, Wellesley girls, in tweed skirts and cloth coats, arrive in Harvard Square by the busload. Only Harvard men manage to sit relatively still. Of course, freshmen do tend to panic. For them, Radcliffe...
...direction of her husband Vadim, dashes about the medieval countryside in none too maidenly pursuit of her brother Peter, who looks lost with out his Harley-Davidson. Peter and Jane play the sole descendants of two feuding families, a fact that only adds zest to Jane's passion. In a singular frenzy, she burns down Peter's stable while Peter is still inside trying to save his favorite horse. The horse lives, but Peter perishes. Unfazed, Jane gets hung up on his black stallion. It's all terribly kinky, with Peter in his leather pants, Jane...
Shaw the iconoclast was not exempt from the Victorian passion for theological speculation. "Mere agnosticism leads nowhere," he once wrote. "I hold as firmly as St. Thomas Aquinas that all truths, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired." Shaw believed in evolution, but was worried about the diverse effects of Darwinist thinking. He agreed, with Samuel Butler, that "by banishing purpose from natural history Darwin had banished mind from the universe." Shaw would have no part of a universe from which a first-rate mind (such as his own) was expelled...