Word: subtlest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Charting the balance of power in the Administration requires sensitivity to the slightest tremor and the subtlest nuance. So when two chairs in the waiting room of Bill Clark's basement White House office were removed, Administration watchers seized upon this seemingly unimportant event as another sign of the National Security Adviser's growing influence. "The place was becoming the Grand Central Station of the West Wing," an aide explains. "Everybody was realizing that it's worth your time to drop by and see Uncle Bill." Now plants sit where chairs once did, politely discouraging people...
Music is the way that our memories sing to us across time. The loveliest quality of music involves its modulation upon the theme of time. Songs, playing in the mind, become the subtlest shuttles across years...
...outside. The country is a prison, every liberating impulse is indictable, and the more righteous villagers are all too willing to play judge and executioner. Adultery is punished by eight months of bread and water; indiscreet lovemaking demands instant and bloody death. In this remorseless landscape, where the subtlest smile on a stolid face can seem an act of anarchy, each prisoner must find fulfillment by pursuing his dark destiny...
...Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism. The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on national interest ran counter to American idealism. On this thesis, Americans must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge; America must commit itself to a crusade against Communism, not just to geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand. But obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal geopolitical challenges because they appear not to encapsulate...
...chairs. Manufacturers did not want to make them. Finally, the belief in progress and human enlightenment, on which De Stijl depended, encountered the brutal history that came in the '30s and '40s. And so, at this far remove, De Stijl retains its fascination as one of the subtlest tissues of Utopian ideas in the history of Western culture. But it is a vision that is proper to museums, and to art; we know that it cannot come true...