Word: peevishly
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Greene did not dream up this terrain of momentous border crossings and casual betrayals, and he could be peevish with those who praised his inventiveness: "Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. 'This is Indochina,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described.' " But on his journeys the author carried a transforming talent and temperament that rendered all the places, no matter...
There is, as is always the case when money is being handed out anywhere, a certain amount of logrolling and favoritism among the peer groups that review applications, and a peevish sense of entitlement among many applicants on the basis of class or race or gender. But the NEA's peer-group system has at least the merit of being a tad more democratic and informed than the fiats of a minister...
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...