Word: tempered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...necessary job: moving Brzezinski back into the shadows a bit. Mondale and a number of White House staffers believed that the National Security Adviser was hurting Carter by acting so flamboyantly. Muskie, they felt, could handle Brzezinski: he was well known for his self-confidence and his hair-trigger temper...
...Muskie trait could obstruct a bipartisan policy: his famed, explosive temper, which resembles the thunderous Mandalay dawn. His face reddens, his finger wags, he appears to swell even larger than his imposing 6 ft. 4 in., and then he erupts. But his fellow Senators, even those who have been the target of his wrath, think his temper is manageable. A pinstriped smoothie he may never be, but, says Wisconsin Democrat Gaylord Nelson, "He doesn't become irrational. He's not going to dump a bomb on the Soviet Union and then say: 'Let's negotiate...
Such palpable hits reveal exhaustive learning. But unlike many essayist-reviewers, Pritchett never preens. His erudition is like old money, reassuringly there but tastefully in the background. His impulse is always to understand rather than attack; he often acknowledges the criticism of others so that he can temper it. He calls Edmund Wilson's plain, sometimes blunt style "democratic, in the sense that this distinguished man will not for long allow one phrase to be better than another." Evelyn Waugh is similarly pardoned: "To object to his snobbery is as futile as objecting to cricket, for every summer...
...refreshing to encounter a dramatist who can people a stage rather than depopulate it. Playwright Shank's specific insight into the modern temper is that most people nowadays are talking to themselves under the guise of talking to others. Fortunately, the Actors Theater of Louisville is conversing on a national network...
From 1945 to 1950, Thesiger lived for long periods among the Bedu (Bedouins) of the Arabian Peninsula. "I was," he writes, "humbled by my illiterate companions, who possessed in so much greater measure generosity, courage, endurance, patience, good temper and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority." He also shared the soggy life of the Madan, Shia Muslims who inhabit the reedy swamps of southeastern Iraq. His two books about these experiences have become contemporary classics: Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs...