Word: talisman
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...Eyes, though menacing in appearance with his tiger skin and collar of snakes, is actually a protective deity in which the eye, symbol of wisdom and knowledge, appears even on his fingertips. Set against a threatening backdrop of flames and darkness, it seems a particularly apt talisman for Bhutan today...
...book is written in the present tense, an irritating literary affectation as a rule. Here the device becomes a knob opening a door to the trancelike continuum of childhood-particularly that of the magic child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness...
...Delhi's Parliament House?where Nehru himself had guided India's fate for 17 years?glided a hauntingly attractive woman, her black hair streaked with grey, her brown eyes moist and mellow. On her brown shawl she wore a rosebud, just as Nehru had always worn one as his talisman of grace and hope in a sometimes graceless and hopeless land. Her hands held palm to palm in the traditional Indian greeting of namaste, she approached former Finance Minister Morarji Desai. "Will you bless my success?" she asked. "I give you my blessing," he replied. Then Indira Gandhi, the only...
...Talisman. Picassos amount to nearly half the bequest; they are particularly welcome, for the gift expands the chameleon career of this master, who has painted through many styles. Thannhauser's Picassos stretch from a 1960 oil of symbolic doves back to a small work of 1898, when the artist still signed his name P. Ruiz Picasso. Next is Picasso's first oil done in Paris, Le Moulin de la Galette, a muted 1900 Lautrecian cabaretscape, gaslit with top hats as sleek and glassy as carafes of absinthe. Included, almost as a talisman, is the 1905 painting...
Occasionally (as when Nabokov solemnly offers as a talisman the lines that happen to fall at the exact center of the work), the notes are extreme enough to be worthy of Professor Kinbote, the demented footnoter of Nabokov's own Pale Fire...