Word: taut
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...with his foes to put the public interest above their partisan concerns-and thus set them up for censure if they fail to respond to the lofty call to statesmanship. Confident, conciliatory and optimistic, Nixon was at his professional best in a speech honed, through eight drafts, to a taut 31 minutes. Heavy on generalities, soft on specifics, the address was far from inspirational, but it did reach a few moments of near eloquence...
...whores, hired killers and psychosadists, news vendors and bar bums, "rape-os" and cops-all move in and out of Johnson's scene, rendered without apology or moral judgment. Unlike writers who have never been there, Johnson has no need to sensationalize the seamy edge of society. In taut, frosted gray prose that is flat but never dull, his characters are compellingly stamped with their limiting individuality, totally unable to be more or less than they are. Silver Street's Tony Lonto, for instance, cannot help being a good cop any more than he can keep from making...
...reader is kept on a taut leash of suspense, and the hero finally becomes a breathing instance of a truth that the radical left tends to overlook. However politically useful they may be, gadflies are born, not made...
...today like most about Lowell is that he seems to be coming apart at the seams himself." But they also have a Virgin Mary-Sylvia Plath, a gifted American girl who wrote despairing verse until, aged 30, she put her head into a gas oven and died. Her poetry, taut with passion, has been aptly described as "the longest suicide note ever written...
...huge Pershing desk, the believer of 1963, the man who thought it could be done and who kept saying "Things are getting better." Then, gray and pinched in 1967, trying to explain why he had become the first to turn publicly against the war. There was his tall, taut Assistant Secretary, John McNaughton, now dead, sweeping confident eyes across the map of the world and talking fast, very fast. Speaking ever so precisely of the potential of yet another of Saigon's revolving governments, the coatless Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy stretched out on his leather couch. Brooding over...