Word: stiff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...head-splitting Calvados (applejack) in Normandy was to be sharply curtailed. Alcoholic contents of wine-based apéritifs were cut, and liquor advertising was to be strictly limited in the future. Besides all this, Mendès planned to ask Parliament for legislation raising liquor taxes and imposing stiff penalties (up to a year in prison) for public drunkenness...
...publishing an article outspokenly critical of Spain's press censorship (TIME, May 31). Franco's press boss ordered Father Iribarren to quit, and his Minister of Information urged Iribarren's superior, Enrique Cardinal Pla y Deniel, Primate of all Spain, to fire the stiff-necked editor. Pla y Deniel refused but secretly suspended Iribarren. A bishop's conference last month put through the dismissal, ostensibly on the grounds that Editor Iribarren had not submitted his controversial article to his superiors...
...young man was breathing hard as he tried for the fourth time to tie his stiff white tie so that both ends would come out even. Then he slipped on his rented tails, feeling a little ridiculous, and off he went to pick up his date. Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera (they said) was just about the most exciting occasion of the New York season and should therefore prove (he hoped) the most effective way to impress a girl. The investment of $60 for a pair of tickets was considerable (particularly since the show was on theater...
...Hook. The program listed the prologue to Pagliacci. The big curtains parted on a husky, stiff-backed man named Leonard Warren, dressed in a peculiar costume-tails and a blue shirt (probably for TV). His words were in incomprehensible Italian, but he certainly could sing. Next came the first act from La Bohème. The scene was a huge, musty attic with four gay blades romping around. The music was very pretty, and it seemed clear that the stocky fellow in an artist's beret named Richard Tucker was making time with Victoria de los Angeles. This kind...
...synopsis as his plot. The result is a heavy burden of exposition, which slows the first act hopelessly and blurs the dramatic focus of the play. More important, while the genius of James as a novelist surmounted awkward handling of dialogue, it is almost wholly from that dialogue--often stiff and opaque--that Archibald has fashioned his play. He might better have interpolated passages in which James lights his characters as he seldom does through their words. On such passages the reader relies above all in regard to the "frail vessel" of James' heroine. Without assurances of Isabel...