Word: peevish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wylie, 41, is a peevish Manhattan literary agent whose most famous client is Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, that prompted the Ayatullah Khomeini to order his execution. The Wylie-Rushdie pairing is apt: if only one of them is an agent, both are provocateurs. At a time when many agents have turned mercenary, Wylie tops them all in aggressiveness and acerbity. Says he: "This little East Hampton approach to publishing, where publishers and agents share summer houses so that they can get together and shaft the writers, has gone by the board -- I'd like...
Many State Department officials, eager to distance themselves from what they regarded as a peevish stance, characterized Shultz's no to Arafat as a "personal decision." They were worried that it would undermine the peace efforts of moderate Arabs and cast doubt on the U.S. commitment to a negotiated settlement in the Middle East. They also fretted that the Shultz rejection made a mockery of America's commitment to free speech and jeopardized the Reagan Administration's recently improved relationship with the U.N. Nonetheless, both Reagan and President-elect George Bush supported the decision, although Bush made it clear that...
...decrease as the days stretch into months. Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, whose 326 days aboard the space station Mir set a space endurance record last year, was down to only two hours of productive work a day toward the end of his eleven-month flight and had become decidedly peevish. "Leave me alone," he once snapped to mission control. "I have a lot of work...
...what comes afterward. Reviewing the Kennedy- Nixon debates reveals that Kennedy was almost as nervous and stilted as Nixon. In the end, the benefit Bush can draw from his tangle with Rather will depend on whether viewers recall it as a moment of justified indignation or as a peevish attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Iran-contra affair. It could go either way, for in fact it was both...
...obviously restless. "I don't think he finds judging all that interesting," says his D.C. circuit colleague Abner Mikva. Why, then, did Bork hang on so long after his defeat? Says Heritage Foundation Legal Expert Bruce Fein: "He didn't want this to look like the peevish decision of an upset...