Word: penchant
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...have to abandon your femininity to make it." No kidding. At a meeting in Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted. Her arsenal includes the occasional girlish giggle, a disarming smile and a sartorial penchant for pure white. To her opponents in the party, those are unfair tactics, ones that mask an ideological emptiness that will show up sooner or later. "Technique doesn't replace politics; there have to be ideas, convictions, a discussion of the stakes," said Lionel Jospin, who, you might have thought, would have...
...Warren, despite his penchant for overripe prose, created an indelible portrait of the American demagogue. And, yes, we acknowledge there is a touch of Willie Stark in every politician who catches the national eye. The line between idealism and opportunism is ever thin as paper. But in Willie's relentless, utterly insatiable appetites there is something beyond the powers of political commentary or literary criticism to convey. It is much more than a conventional ambition, a presidential dream. Lots of men entertain that fantasy. What drives him is an unacknowledged anarchy of the soul. There is no reason why Willie...
...Franzen wasn't popular. "I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak...
...prison cells - which start at around $22 a night - were refurbished by local and foreign artists. Bars on the windows and doors have been retained, as have the barbed wire and period graffiti on the property's perimeter walls. Given the modern penchant for minimalism, the revamped cells might seem almost as spartan as the oubliettes they once were, so if you would prefer something less ascetic you can opt for an apartment (sleeping seven), normal shared rooms or a dormitory bed. A requirement that guests strip their own beds upon departure smacks of a prison regime rather more than...
...data aren't helping. Bernanke looks at about 25 sets of data a day, and often they are at odds with one another. While Greenspan had a penchant for obscure statistics, like the production of No. 5 trucks, Bernanke sticks closer to mainstream data. "I never knew what a No. 5 truck was," says Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman and a professor at Princeton. "Bernanke probably doesn't either." The minutes from the May meeting of the Fed committee that sets rates showed that opinions ranged from doing nothing to raising rates 0.5%. The Fed raised rates...