Word: temperments
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...inaccuracies of the account. It sounded like somebody playing old White House tapes. John Kennedy blew up at the New York Herald Tribune, and canceled all 22 White House subscriptions to the newspaper They used to keep the bad clips from Ike to avoid eruptions of his barracks temper. L.B.J. thought the press was a giant conspiracy to portray him as "your corn-pone President." During Watergate, Ron Ziegler's press briefings often had a portion devoted to the sins of the Washington Post...
Dragon [1952, 1964, 1976]--Your fiery reputation is based on an outward show of stubbornness and short temper, but underneath you are really gentle, sensitive and softhearted...
...else could mortals account for lost objects and the malfunctions of the material world? It was no accident that a new strain of elves-gremlins-magically appeared at about the time of World War II, when things began going wrong with airplanes. For centuries the presence of fairies helped temper parental rage at the misbehavior of children; the ethereal little devils were responsible. When things went bump in the night, it was far better to suspect the hobgoblins than creatures more substantial and threatening. Most important, the winged folk held out the prospect of an airy, insubstantial and blissfully frivolous...
Those lines are a prophetic summary of the modern temper; small wonder that Wallace Stevens wrote of Baudelaire, "His stanzas hang like hives in hell." It is to be hoped that Alex de Jonge's book will help to dispel the poet's legend and resurrect his verse for a wider audience. But that hope, too, may be a drug. In which case, Baudelaire still wins, screaming over the gulf of a century: "Hypocrite lecteur-mon semblable -mon frère!" (Hypocrite reader-my double-my brother!). Melvin Maddocks
...fortunes Liddell follows almost as assiduously as he does the poet's. And, while Cavafy was not entirely representative of his time, place and background, his story gives an indication of the life of Egypt's ingrown expatriate Greek community at the turn of the century, of the political temper of the times (in which Cavafy was as uninvolved as he could manage to be), of family relations and of social expectations...