Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Humility and Hubris, A symphony orchestra is one of civilization's most highly and delicately collaborative creations. To preside over one requires an odd mixture of mind, heart and common sense as well as a less tangible quality sometimes called animal magnetism, or sheer sex appeal. Thomas seems to possess all these qualities in good measure. For one so successful and so young, he also seems to have a remarkably good balance between humility and hubris. In rehearsal he has no hesitation in asking the orchestra's advice on how to get effects. "At the end of last...
...everybody agrees on the importance of the works. Part of the dissent is ideological. The count's title was bestowed on him by Mussolini after he made a politic gift of several statues and other art objects to the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome. Part is sheer Italian snobbery. Contini-Bonacossi was the son of peasants, who made his fortune in South America by methods that are still muffled in obscurity. When he returned to Florence, he set himself up as an art dealer and put his collection together between...
Many a first-rate pianist has taken up conducting as a career. For Leonard Bernstein, the late George Szell and Daniel Barenboim, it was largely a matter of having a large and effusive talent-or sheer ambition-that simply had to spread into other fields. When Pianist Leon Fleisher took the podium last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, however, it was a case of dire necessity. Though he was once the foremost pianist of his generation, his right hand has been partly crippled since 1965, and he is trying to establish himself in a new career...
...sheer power and wealth, few African males can match the market mammy, that gigantic woman of commerce who controls much of the transport and the trade in textiles, food and hardware in both Nigeria and Ghana. In Lagos, bankers tell of one hefty woman who cannot write her own name, but can get a $560,000 letter of credit whenever she needs one. In Accra, the mammies have been wooed and feared by politicians since independence, and no government has managed to tax them effectively. "They can't read or write," says one Ghanaian journalist, "but they can damn...
Prosperity and rising profits then inspired a strong demand for stocks, but the supply was limited. Prices went through the roof. "The enormous rise," insists Stein, "had less to do with a sober assessment of a company's performance than with the sheer shortage of stock. People were not buying companies; they were buying the market." That situation is not likely to recur, because today's profits are modest, corporate debt is high and interest rates are steep. The switch away from debt issues and into equity issues has already begun. Last year U.S. companies put out a record dollar...