Word: temperments
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Although he achieved fame in the 1950s as one of England's Angry Young Men, Author Alan Sillitoe never lost his temper in his books. The working-class characters in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1960) did indeed rail at the upward immobility of the British class system; it was Sillitoe's cool precision in portraying them that made these fumings so hot to the touch. Sillitoe's restraint, his continued attention to the Nottinghamshire region of his own childhood, are quiet virtues that the noisy passage...
...similar views-he saw red over a story about group sex that he found tasteless-but rarely loses his temper and always bubbles with enthusiasm for the task at hand, whether weeding his garden or pruning his executive ranks. "The idea that a publisher sits up here and issues directives, wields great power and smites people to their knees is a lot of baloney," he says. "But it's a lot of fun. It's the best job in the world...
Death Threat. A lefthander with a sizzling backhand and an impressive overhead. McEnroe was swinging relaxed and free, fully aware that the pressure was on the big names to defeat him In the dubious new tradition of explosive court manners, he threw his share of temper tantrums-and racquets-along the way. Still, compared with Nastase's death threat against a New York Times reporter and Connors' deliberate snub of the parade of past champions, McEnroe's behavior was no more reprehensible than that of a high-spirited schoolboy-which he is. McEnroe's remarkable odyssey...
Beyond doubt the American temper is strikingly different today from what it was then. After World War II, the nation enjoyed an almost cocky belief that it could do anything - and everything. Had not the U.S. just saved civilization? Did not the U.S. own the Bomb? Most Americans were eager to proclaim their nation the greatest. And they turned out to be perfectly willing to prove it - once they had been asked to. Americans of Marshall's day, of course, also had trust in their Government - and a certitude about their power to prevail that had not been crumpled...
Jones never seemed thrown or slowed down by the loss of critical approval. Indeed, he never indulged in the public pouts one expects of celebrated literary types. In Paris, apart from a couple of boorish flashes of temper, he lived an abundant life and made his strikingly craggy face familiar around the boulevards. He also continued to write and yearn for literary immortality. Even when he did gripe about reviewers, one could wonder whether he really cared what they were saying-or even quite understood. "They just said I was a bad writer, bad grammar, blah, blah, blah," he told...