Word: torso
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...humanoid swan giving a passable imitation of a shy maiden. This remarkable ballerina is now 48, and her short, chunky legs have clearly lost some of their spring. But Plisetskaya's legs seem almost secondary to her dancing genius; what matters more is her elegantly arched, endlessly supple torso, and above all, her arms. There are no others like them in all of dance. When she floats offstage at the end of the act in a pas de bourrée of astound ing purity, her gently rippling arms seem to be without bones...
...Tairona, Tolima and Muisca, Narino and Calima - shared, whatever their differences of society and religion, a superb instinct for the vital shape. Whether the object is a heart-shaped Calima pectoral with a fierce mask glaring from the center of its luxuriant curves, or a Muisca votive figure whose torso is compressed and flattened into a long triangular wedge of gold, or the magnificent Tairona pectoral with its three fierce birds' heads stabbing outward, the forms are so energetic in their stylization and so terse in their modeling that, even on this tiny scale, the pieces cease...
...country is old and proud. You finds dignity compressed in the ancient marble of a limbless torso; you gaze at the opaque eyes of a statue and know its vision penetrates eternity, and remember tales of heroes. There is suffering etched deep in the skin of an old woman's face. Even a child's eyes seem to recall the glory and struggle of centuries past. You ache to think that people so fiercely proud and persistent are being brutally trampled underfoot. For now the heels of marching boots crush a people against the hard earth of their fathers...
...touting them all, Schonberg strains his expletives and his description. Steinitz, "born lame, heroic above the torso and a cripple below... had a grudge against the world, and the world returned it." Pillsbury "was genuinely admired as a human being as well as one of the chess geniuses...
...these wretched men. He records "with shame" an incident he witnessed at the front. A sergeant of the Soviet Secret police, on horseback, was using a knout on a captured Russian soldier who had served in a German unit. Staggering, the man was naked from the waist up, his torso covered with blood. Suddenly he cried out to Solzhenitsyn in agony: "Mister Captain...