Word: patrician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Patent Sophistry. But competing with Buckley becomes more difficult with each week that he is on-camera. To his peerless rhetoric he is now adding increasingly polished stage business. Just before he delivers a cruncher, his tongue licks from the corner of his mouth, his patrician voice rasps into a lower register. Similarly, the elevation of his eyebrows telegraphs the drop of a guillotine blade. Another Buckley tactic-when the antagonist has the floor-is to close his eyes, as if he is hearing insufferable platitudes, or to raise them heavenward, as if to invoke Aquinas against such patent sophistry...
...Likeness. Turner's romanticism was directed more at his art than his private life. A reclusive bachelor till his death in 1851, he was more a stodgy old crumpet than the philanderer who, several biographers have hinted, fathered five illegitimate children. Though fame attracted him, he dodged the patrician world of fox hunts and fancy clubs, ended up living in a dilapidated London town house, cluttered with what he called his "darlings"-his paintings-or in a little Thames-side refuge where he was thought by neighbors to be a certain Admiral Booth, husband of the landlady...
...thing or two about finances and investing. But in 1918, he quit his job to go "on the bum, mostly because I wanted to find a way to the top." He found it six months later when he met some songwriters in a New York delicatessen. After the patrician manners of Baruch, the tunesmiths looked to him "like a bunch of dumbheads"-until he learned that some of the heads were creating $50,000 worth of songs a year. Again Billy got the jump on the competition, analyzed every novelty song of the day. All of them, he decided...
Finally, as the first members came out, someone shouted, "Is it a boy or a girl?" "A girl," came back the answer, and up went the cheers. Then a few minutes later, Indira appeared. The patrician profile, the pale smile, the rosebud?all reminded the crowd of their beloved Panditji. "Indira Gandhi zindabadr chanted the throng. "Long live Indira Gandhi...
Though the author imposes no patterns, a pattern emerges. The patrician and idle society of the past was in its last days. The industrial revolution had produced new men, with new ideas that were sometimes wildly impractical, often idealistic, but always intent on making themselves felt. Her book amounts to a close-up view of the clash between them...