Word: temperamental
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with its layers of grandiloquent Southern mendacity, might serve as an emblem for the life of its creator. The playwright with the arresting name of Tennessee was born plain Thomas; Williams wreathed himself in beguiling inventions and evasions. Some of these were the by...
The intensity of Heaney's poetry stems largely from a Roman Catholic temperament that has been baffled by doubt. "My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension," he once told an interviewer. "But then there's the reality: there's no heaven...
Appropriately enough, Bergman decided to model his putatively most personal of films, "Hour of the Wolf," after The Sandman by the great German fantasy writer E.T.A. Hoffman, a story for which no critic ever has written a satisfactory and definitive interpretation. In both tales an artist of questionable talent and...
Even a first-class temperament, however, is not a sure predictor of a successful presidency. According to Duke University political scientist James David Barber, the most perfect blend of intellect and warmth of personality in a Chief Executive was the brilliant Thomas Jefferson, who "knew the importance of communication and...
History professor William Leuchtenburg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the 20th century Presidents with perhaps the highest IQs--Wilson, Hoover and Carter--also had the most trouble connecting with their constituents. Woodrow Wilson, he says, "was very high strung [and] arrogant; he was not...