Word: thinker
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There were also ironies aplenty in Reagan's choice of O'Connor. As a true-blue conservative, he had been widely expected to select a rigidly doctrinaire jurist in order to stamp his own political ideology on the court. Instead, he picked a meticulous legal thinker whose devotion to precedent and legal process holds clear priority over her personal politics, which are Republican conservative...
...left, probably works harder than the other judges on his decisions, which often reflect his ad hoc, personal sense of right and wrong. The courtly Virginian, Lewis Powell, is regarded as the great balancer, in the middle on almost every case. John Paul Stevens, the most original thinker on the court, is an iconoclastic loner who likes to file separate opinions that challenge old assumptions even when his conclusions coincide with those of his brothers. Byron White, the best pure lawyer on the court, is unpredictably liberal and unpredictably conservative, but meticulously careful about facts and precedent...
...zanne exhibition was to painting: a means of making us see afresh the processes and fantasies, the obsessions and failures and triumphs of a very great artist whose work we assumed to be familiar. Who does not know Auguste Rodin, given that reproductions of The Kiss and The Thinker are the very furniture of cliché? Yet this exhibition shows us what we did not know. It brings forth not the debased Rodin of popular culture, or Rodin the herald of a modernism he did not live to see, but the actual artist, embedded in the 19th century, soaked...
...with, the relentless autophagy: the cannibalizing, part by part, of his own images in numerous variations, a self-reflexive mode of invention that one associates more with Picasso than anyone earlier. This point is brought home dramatically by the gallery of motifs from The Gates of Hell, from The Thinker itself (originally meant to be the central figure over the doorway, a Dante dreaming the whole Inferno) to the battalion of flying, crouching, writhing figures, bare forked animals all, that crowd the plinths...
...that O'Neill had developed any confidence in Reagan as President - or as a thinker. To the contrary, the Speaker returned from White House meetings and told aides that he was astonished at the empty conversations. Reagan was a nice guy all right, related Tip, but not one for heavy business. When O'Neill raised certain issues, he reported, the President would invariably deflect them to an aide and resume his easy storytelling. Never, declared the disbelieving Speaker, had he seen a President work in such a detached...