Word: wanly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...popular reputation, Jean-Honore Fragonard is often dismissed as a purveyor of teasingly erotic marzipan: images of rose-cheeked, button-eyed demimondaines in leafy bowers, often dallying with wan, wigged swains. The extraordinary exhibition of Fragonard's works that opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that can be seen there until May 8, amply demonstrates the limiting inaccuracy of that view. In reality, Fragonard was probably the most versatile of the great masters of 18th century French...
...perfection from our leaders, and I don't think we should begin now." He added, "I'm a sinner, but my religion tells me that all of us are sinners." His rivals never mentioned Hart's character or morals. Two hours was all it took for Hart, who seemed wan and out of practice, to take on the earnest aspect of just another Democrat debating issues...
...corollary to the notion that the crazy state is incompetent is the notion that it must ultimately self-destruct. Americans keep waiting for that to happen to the mullahs, the Sandinistas and the rest of the world's zealots. It is a wan hope. This century has not been kind to the notion that fanaticism must collapse from within. Generally, the crazy state does not self-destruct. On the contrary, it must be destroyed from without: Hitler by the Allies, the Khmer Rouge by Viet Nam, Idi Amin by Tanzania. (In his last years Stalin was no less irrational than...
...police and politicians in his silk pocket, runs the city, abetted by gun- crazy Frank Nitti (Billy Drago). Ness's "untouchable" aides are an Italian- American sharpshooter (Andy Garcia), a bespectacled accountant (Charles Martin Smith) and an aging cop, Jimmy Malone (Connery). Malone is a father figure, an Obi-Wan Kenobi to Ness's Luke Skywalker, alerting him to the ways of the wicked world. Perhaps Ness becomes too alert. He defeats Capone, but, he notes, "I became what I beheld...
...sense, then, our monarchs are in fact our subjects, hostage to the dreams we wish them to enact. Axel, the wan hero dreamed up by the French symbolist Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, famously suggested that he and his fellow aristocrats leave the messy business of living to their servants; these days, we would just as soon leave it to our monarchs. We demand of them, moreover, a double role: they must be godlike mortals, fallible gods. Upon peering into their closets, we wish not only to marvel at the gowns but also to revel in the skeletons that hang...