Word: penchant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Hope Hampton, 84, silent-film actress whose penchant for sequins, diamonds and publicity made her a fixture of café society long after her career had faded; of a heart attack; in New York City. A devotee of luxury, Hampton once said, "A woman can get by being dumb and beautiful...
...spending and Government intervention in people's lives. Two days later, the two Houses of Congress reassemble to commemorate the 100th birthday of the man generally credited (or blamed) for creating the era of Big Government: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Reagan likes to use such occasions to indulge his penchant for quoting Roosevelt, the hero of his youth, bending to his own purposes one of the famous Rooseveltian phrases about the forgotten man or the generation that has a rendezvous with destiny. The speakers at the F.D.R. commemoration, by contrast, generally regard Reagan as a doctrinaire conservative determined to tear...
Roosevelt's penchant for experimenting guided his chief measure for industrial revival, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and his choice of the man he put in command of it, General Hugh ("Ironpants") Johnson. A profane and red-faced ex-cavalryman, an admirer of Mussolini and good bourbon, West Pointer Johnson had spent the war years spurring the Selective Service System and applying the whip to the War Industries Board, which supervised the manufacturing and sale of military supplies...
...England during World War II, Von Bülow studied law at Cambridge. His reputation as a bright barrister attracted Oil Billionaire J. Paul Getty, who made him a chief aide. Getty called him "an extra right arm" and said he had "a rapier-quick mind and a penchant for hard work." Von Bülow is said to be a man of great wit and charm, but his cosmopolitan suaveness and reputed right-wing views have not appealed to all. Says one acquaintance: "He isn't a monocle popper, not a Junker type at all. He is softer...
From then on, it was all a cancerous bloom. Suddenly, 200 million Americans--Trow has a penchant for all or nothing thinking--entered a state of degrading obeisance to what he calls "the aesthetic of the hit." It was not what you did or how you did it, but the awareness that people everywhere were doing the same thing that mattered. Since "the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action...men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement." Things went more awry than ever in the places where power is held...