Word: possessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...somehow meant that France had recovered from the basic political weakness that caused its collapse in 1940. The postwar phrase?the Big Four?was a misnomer; France is not a great power, but a great civilization, politically paralyzed. EDC asked France to show a self-confidence it did not possess. Indo-China asked France to show a will to win it did not possess. A new Premier, Pierre Mendès-France, made France's allies face the old fact of France's weakness...
...last of the great Western nations to possess a national gallery of art. Yet now, less than 14 years after its dedication, the National Gallery in Washington ranks with the world's finest. The gallery's principal offering is a grand tour of Western art-from stiff but splendid beginnings in Siena and Florence right through to the skyrocket flash and fizzle of modern times. Casual visitors may make the tour in a day, students in a decade; the gallery is solidly studded with masterpieces...
...Roger B. Lustrand, a bachelor, "having discovered that most of the children on his Christmas list possess large collections of such records as Quacky Clarinet and Otto the Ophicleide*. . . makes a habit of bringing them LPs of the most recondite sort of music: Schoenberg, neoclassic Stravinsky, or Varèse ... A few of the modern parents in Roger's circle actually rear their children on such music. For them, Lustrand thoughtfully provides a present of the Terry the Timpani variety, the most banal he can find, which inevitably becomes the favorite item in the nursery library...
...hurt when he was portrayed, at a Gridiron Club dinner, as a strutting, vain Donald Duck. Said he: "Of course this was really offensive . . . No man is a judge of himself, but I have completely fooled myself if I give the impression to anyone that I am conceited and possess a feeling of superiority over other men." Yet Ickes could describe his part in a political radio debate in these words: "He [Ickes' opponent] expected the head-down, arm-flailing rush, trying to beat him into a corner or to knock him out. Instead, I danced around him, fighting...
...this most-human humor that is Wilde's greatest gift to English literature. Much as he loved to pretend that he was too detached an artist to have "sympathies," every word he wrote shows that he was much too softhearted (and not really intelligent enough) to possess the large hatreds of a Swift or the noisy spites of a Sean O'Casey. If his plays date, it is not because the humor has gone bad, but because the plots are usually as sappy and mawkish as the worst of Dickens...