Word: patinas
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Nehru's English patina, however, was deceptive. "Behind me," he wrote years after his return from Britain, "lie somewhere the subconscious racial memories of a hundred generations of Brahmans." Behind him, too, were conscious memories of hearing since childhood of the "overbearing character and insulting manner of English people . . . toward Indians." Those memories made him a champion of the underdog and filled him with his own intense brand of racial prejudice. "I try to be impartial and objective," he noted in his autobiography, "but the Asiatic in me influences my judgment whenever an Asiatic people are concerned...
...lives, of a pompous fool for whom better people have toiled and a shallow woman with whom better men are infatuated, is wonderfully life-sized and life-stained. Compared to The Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard, Vanya has little resonance or fragrance: it offers fly-specks rather than patina, flatted notes oftener than chords. Chekhov boils down his characters' moral attitudes to reveal personal resentments, and shows the flabbiness of it-might-have-been no less than the pathos. But just because his people exhibit as much needless waste as honest wear in their lives, they are extraordinarily...
...wife's death he has lived at 16 Louisburg Square with an old friend and an Irish housekeeper. Most of his books are as Bostonian as the Old North Church. Samples: Semicentennial History of the Tavern Club; Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries. Yet for all his patina, Howe is not a proper Proper Bostonian...
Venice's greatest triumph was a display of 163 ritual bronzes, semiabstractions of dragons and sundry monsters, mellowed by the patina of the centuries. It was the age of the pieces, dating back to the Yin dynasty, that most impressed the nonexpert art lovers. But it was their forms, especially one unique three-legged chüeh (wine goblet) of the Yin period, that delighted the connoisseurs. Said Florence's aged (89) art oracle, Expatriate Bernard Berenson: "The best collection of Chinese bronzes ever brought together under one roof in Europe...
...stories in these two collections form a literary skyline ranging from grand ruins to temporary housing. After weathering the years in all critical climates, the French tales, engineered by such masters as Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupassant, are pitted in spots, but glow with the patina of timelessness. The Italian stories, put up in the hurry and scurry of the post-World War I decades by such contemporary literary architects as Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi and Vasco Pratolini, rock with life, and occasionally with shaky craftsmanship. American readers, surfeited with New Yorker-like tales of muted discontent, may find both collections...