Word: penchant
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...Risk. The U-2 was born of necessity. In early 1952, U.S. intelligence officers recognized that the continuing revolution in weapon design, coupled with the Soviets' fanatic penchant for secrecy, had put the U.S. at a dangerous disadvantage. The U.S. was starved for intelligence information. The most obvious solution was high-altitude air surveillance. President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson both agreed that such air reconnaissance was desirable-but they were unwilling to pursue such a project for fear of the results if a spy plane were shot down...
...Karl Marx was the most important man of the century" without being sacked. (He should have been fired for puerility, not subversion.) This humanist hails from New England, but his behavior is strictly late Roman. He weeps a lot, likes to fiddle with flower arrangements, takes barbiturates, has a penchant for sharing his quarters with other delicate young men. Occasionally he reproaches himself in lush metaphor. "You talk like a gelded pedagogue who has never felt the blood of manhood throbbing like red Chianti in his veins...
...form ugly. While his comrade in Cubism, Picasso, was sensual, Spanish, and an endless innovator, Braque was rational, French, and restrained. As Braque explained in 1917: "The senses deform, the mind forms. Reality grows out of contained emotion. I like the rule that corrects the emotion." But from his penchant for paradox, he added, "I love the emotion that corrects the rule...
...selection surprised almost everyone in Pittsburgh except close associates. The new president of Westinghouse is not even listed in the Pittsburgh Registry of Corporation Executives, and oddly, in view of Burnham's penchant for automation, the head of the Westinghouse union local had never heard...
...light reading, De Gaulle occasionally shows a penchant for the torrid. The pro-Gaullist weekly Le Nouveau Candide raised Parisian eyebrows some time ago by reporting that De Gaulle had read Les Pianos Mecaniques by Henri-Francois Rey. A French bestseller highly praised by the critics, Pianos is a sort of Dolce Vita set on Spain's Costa Brava whose main characters-a schizophrenic journalist, a neglected teen-age boy and girl, a half-wit charwoman-move through their pointless lives battling boredom with promiscuity. Sample passage: "She led him to the bed, still keeping their lips locked. Vincent...