Word: venal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Caesar the hero of the play?" and "Why would an honorable man like Brutus join in the conspiracy against Caesar?" are good Aristote lian questions. Nor is Machiavelli unfathomable in an age well versed in political manipulation. Merely asking if Caesar, Cassius and Brutus appear honest, awe-inspiring or venal amounts to considering these characters in Machiavellian terms...
...WHEN America should be doing all in its power to nurture mass transit, the Greater Boston area this week faces the shutdown of its subway, bus and commuter rail service. The paradox presents an object lesson in the venal intricacies of Massachusetts politics; it represents as well an opportunity too good to miss for the transformation of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) into a stable transit network...
...Godard female has often been a prostitute. She expresses his vision of every man-woman relationship, and serves as a metaphor for the personal film maker in a tawdry art-industry. But Isabelle, in Every Man, exists simply to endure: to suffer the indignities of venal clients, and to survive with her mystery intact. She is a modern, unsentimental version of the silent-screen innocent who is noble not because of what she does but because of what men do to her. She is touched - indeed, pawed and probed - but never moved. And that is her revenge on the male...
...Hagman like an iron whip in a velvet glove-few viewers would care that he was near death or trouble themselves to ponder the assailant's identity. If the scheming scion of Ewing Oil were not surrounded by a nest of relatives, all pursuing their venal and venereal desires through a plot delirious in its complexity, he would be perceived as a cartoon villain among prime time's standard retinue of sanctified simps. If Dallas did not offer the rarest of series commodities-narrative surprise and character change -the attempt on J.R.'s life would...
Brubaker, like Murton, discovers that the horrors of prison life are not waste products of idle sadism; they are manifestations of a wider corruption. The penalty for exposing these evils is death - a sentence carried out by the venal trusties and implicitly condoned by their civilian counterparts, the local politicians and businessmen. It is the discovery of the victims' graves that brings Brubaker to its ambiguous climax...