Word: prickly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fragile beauty has cast her on film as Isadora Duncan, Mary Queen of Scots and Guinevere. Her toughness made her an anti-Nazi adventurer in Julia and a fierce literary agent in Prick Up Your Ears. Onstage in the summer of 1986 in London, she demonstrated her range by alternating as the worldly queen in Antony and Cleopatra and the humiliated, housebound maiden in The Taming of the Shrew. If anything linked those two roles, it was only the pained look they shared, that unforgettable gaze from those grave and piercing eyes as they take in the unimaginable perfidy...
...proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people who had to die in airline crashes in different countries before the crash became newsworthy . . . One hundred Czechs were equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom." Such bias seems widespread. Fleet...
...were soon outpaced by events. Try these on for nostalgia's sake. A sitting Governor like Dukakis can never be nominated because he would be unable to devote enough time to contest Iowa. The Bush campaign is a balloon kept aloft by a thin membrane of inevitability, so the prick of a single bad defeat will send it sputtering to earth. And that fanciful dream of reporters everywhere: with so many candidates in both parties, at least one of the races is certain to go all the way to a deadline-defying finish at the convention...
...made for Al Capone by his attorney against the mobster's will. That is something that could not happen in any court still observing the fundamentals of the Constitution. In Speed-the-Plow Mamet makes the unastonishing revelation that movie moguls are venal and pandering. Perhaps he means to prick spectators' consciences by holding them responsible for the box-office triumph of trivia over moral concern...
...have a tendency to paint him as a bloodthirsty, raving madman, and while Miller's Shylock is appropriately vengeful and merciless, he also rarely loses his cool. He demands the justice and respect he deserves as a man but is denied because of his religion. He pleads. "If You prick us [Jews]. do we not bleed...