Word: patricians
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...hear you saying, "but Jim Carrey is funny!" Yep. Sandler is Carrey or Jerry Lewis without the physical dexterity, Danny Kaye without the verbal grace, Steve Martin without the patrician veneer. In the longer movie view, he's Abbott without Costello. Moviemakers and critics were probably not thrilled that, in 1941, with a mediocre B movie called Buck Privates, Bud and Lou were briefly Hollywood's top stars. What can we say? People want to laugh--at anything. Sandler happens...
...Kissinger grumbled after becoming Nixon's National Security Adviser. "He is still enough of a gentleman to knife me in the chest." So true, even now. In his new book, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (Hill and Wang; 647 pages; $35), the patrician Bundy is still inserting the knife in a gentle, gentlemanly way. His title comes from Sir Walter Scott's lines about the "tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive." In assessing Nixon and Kissinger, Bundy comes to the unsurprising conclusion that "the taste for acting secretly...
F.D.R. was the best loved and most hated American President of the 20th century. He was loved because, though patrician by birth, upbringing and style, he believed in and fought for plain people--for the "forgotten man" (and woman), for the "third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." He was loved because he radiated personal charm, joy in his work, optimism for the future. Even Charles de Gaulle, who well knew Roosevelt's disdain for him, succumbed to the "glittering personality," as he put it, of "that artist, that seducer." "Meeting him," said Winston Churchill, "was like...
Whatever the disappointments of her material--and granted, these shortcomings would almost certainly go unnoticed coming from any other author--Morrison stood proud atop the evening like the Tall Ships in our harbor, her elocution marvelous and her words like banners unfurled. Her delivery maintained a patrician exactitude--affording the word "vegetable" its deserved four syllables, crisply enunciating the second "t" in "tomatoes"--that rivaled her beautiful prose itself as a tribute to our language...
...maddeningly difficult to read. Portrait of a Married Couple, 1523-24, looks like an ordinary marriage portrait, painted with exquisite fluency and respect: an upper-class man with a squarish, brown-bearded face (he looks oddly like the late Gianni Versace) sitting at a table with an equally patrician woman, Venetian evidently, from the white lapdog she is holding. Her right hand rests devotedly on her husband's upper arm. Marital concord...