Word: penchant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Since a penchant for public confession is one of the most essential items of equipment for a would-be mahatma, Dalmia concentrated on owning up past misdeeds. He admitted that he had once been seized with passion for a distant female relative. "Shamelessly, I proposed a meeting to [my first wife] . . . She lost no time in getting friendly with the lady and persuaded her to agree to my beastly proposal." He admitted, too, that his business morality had been shaky: "I feel as if I had sucked the blood of the poor in establishing the big name of Dalmia...
Jack ("The Dandy") Parisi is a toadlike little man with amazingly large bags under his eyes and an unswerving penchant for flashy clothes. During the big years of New York's Murder, Inc., he made his living by shooting people. But though he finished off a lot of them, most of the details of his life remain obscure. Jack is not a talkative man. "If you hung him up by the thumbs for eight weeks," said a Bronx prosecutor, "he might tell you his first name...
...patron is, perhaps unwittingly, a murderous indictment of a spoiled and kittenish aesthete. Gathorne-Hardy was allowed plenty of free time, but Smith often made his life miserable with his whims and pouts, especially during his intermittent bouts of melancholia, which he called his "interlunaries." And his penchant for repeating anecdotes would drive Gathorne-Hardy to otherwise unmotivated trips to the washroom...