Word: shyness
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...Mohammed, had him duly "selected" by the council of Ulemas. Deeply religious, pensive Mohammed said little, always dressed in a flowing djella-bah, spent most of his time in pious ritual. He had been married off at 16 to a girl a year younger. The French mistook his shyness for timidity, his silence for ignorance. Mohammed was neither an intellectual nor a scholar, but he was intelligent and observant. "He loses nothing of what he's told, even less of what he sees," said an aide. "He stores up everything inside...
...company's debts), Lambert has kept busy away from industry. He has learned to paint, to play politics (for Republican candidates), to write thrillers (Murder in Newport). As owner-skipper of the famed yachts Yankee, Vanitie and Atlantic, he has lost the last of his loneliness and shyness amid Morgans and Vanderbilts...
Once in, Hoover found the path strewn with difficulty. An inordinate shyness, accentuated by his deafness, was mistaken for gruffness, an engineer's anxiety to be letter-perfect, for indecision. Twice while Dulles was absent, Hoover as Acting Secretary had to take responsibility for poor staff work that produced diplomatic boomerangs: 1) the U.S. snub in April 1955 of Communist China's offer to negotiate disagreements that were leading the two nations toward war; 2) the on-again, off-again shipment of 18 U.S. tanks to Saudi Arabia last winter in the midst of Israel's strongest...
...your life inspires." But now for the first time in his life J.D.R. Jr. was already beginning to explore the meanings of warmer words than confidence. Awkwardly, at the age of 20, he had learned how to dance. "I made up my mind that I had to conquer my shyness. I had to get a measure of social ease," he wrote home to his mother, who frowned on dancing. He began calling upon a Providence belle named Abby Aldrich, daughter of Rhode Island's powerful, wealthy senior U.S. Senator, Nelson Aldrich, at her home at 110 Benevolent Street...
Ervine's view is both more intimate and more level than that of earlier Shavian biographers, who usually presented him as a fabulous monster. Ervine is able to discuss his immense shyness, to chide him when necessary for the "tosh" that often came from his "spinsterly mind," to assert, against all previous evidence, that he was generous in money matters, and to dispose of Oxford Don A.J.P. Taylor's assertion that "Shaw was never unhappy." Shaw's loveless childhood, drink-ridden father and hungry adolescence make it quite clear that few university dons have started life with...