Word: peevish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Franco was still beaming next day as he gave Abdullah a spectacular public embrace. Madrid declared a national holiday the better to welcome the royal guest. One peevish cobbler grumbled: "Haven't we enough saints' days which keep us from working without a Moorish king thrown in as well...
...cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications, he struck, as Critic Gerald Johnson once said, right between the eyes...
...Panova's characters is the old party rank & filer, now a commissar with a bleak smile and cold eye, who finds himself bewildered because, though he knows he shouldn't be, he is unhappy. Another is an ugly, peevish, middle-aged nurse secretly in love with feeble Dr. Suprugov. The doctor himself, a weak, cunning, vain, lying, frightened creature, might have come out of Chekhov...
Next day, the temper increased. Communist Deputy Fausto Gullo, a peevish pout on his face, charged his enemies with the old tactics of Lysistrata.* Cried he: "These last elections have been shameful. The government used unthinkable methods to win its majority. Do you want an example? Priests openly counseled wives to go on a 'bedroom strike' if the Communists won the elections...
...London too. The Times Literary Supplement seized the occasion of The Iceman Cometh's publication there to beat him black & blue. The characters in his plays were described as generally "ineffectual egotists," his philosophy was "jejune," Strange Interlude "badly bungled," Beyond the Horizon's leading man "a peevish Hamlet who whines and snivels," and the O'Neill dramaturgy generally "the sort of stuff that might be written by an earnest sophomore...