Word: piquant
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...years, like temperamental lovers, Italy's government and Italy's taxpayers have systematically betrayed each other. The taxpayers seldom, if ever, declared more than a third of their true income for tax purposes. The government automatically taxed them for three times whatever they declared. The relationship was piquant and passionate, and altogether too unsettling for Finance Minister Ezio Vanoni...
There is a sly humor in such episodes as that of Noah and the Flood; a piquant realism to making the headquarters of the Lord a sleepy, small-town office. The best performances-such as Ossie Davis' as Gabriel-have an easy charm, and the best of Robert Edmond Jones's sets have a clean, morning freshness. And the Hall Johnson Choir strikes a resonant note with its singing of the spirituals...
...Margery Pinchwife) who is trying to escape from the close confinement exercised by her aging roue husband (Pinchwife) into the gay, loose world of London society; the second is a triangle between Pinchwife's sister, the fop Sparkish, and the wit Harcourt; the third involves the bold and unquestionably piquant attempt of one Mr. Horner to pass himself off as recently castrated, in order to gain access (for purposes easily imagined) to the wives and daughters of unsuspecting friends and associates. How these plots are connected and what strategems are used by the various contestants (people in the seventeenth century...
...close acquaintances. By this transparent device she manages to write a great deal about people intrinsically far more interesting than Fanny herself, notably Fanny's Father Charles Burney, the fashionable music teacher, and Hester Thrale, the fascinating woman who lodged Dr. Johnson for many years. This gallery of piquant people is what makes the biography so entertaining...
...well. Photographers snapped him at St. Patrick's Cathedral and the ballet with brunette, thirtyish ex-Model Sloan Simpson, a fashion consultant whom he met about a year ago. Newsmen scraped together hints that suggested a wedding by Christmas. It would be the second for each.* The most piquant hint came from the mayor himself. Asked pointblank for his intentions, O'Dwyer parried: "I will discuss that after the election." Then he leaned back in his chair and whistled a few bars of Some Enchanted Evening...