Word: whiffs
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...author, was that he pandered too glibly to the natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead...
...literary figure of real standing who brings a whiff of hard-core Russian nationalism into the Presidential Council
...Rosenthal. This well-appointed, bustling termitarium does not seem the natural habitat of a writer, but Turow blends in easily. He carries a suitably stuffed and scuffed briefcase; he wears dark suits and serious, lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from that heard in the hallways or elevators; he flattens his vowels and comes down hard on his rs, in the approved Midwestern manner, and tends to drop the final g from words like coming...
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, Britain became famous for its merchant adventurers, bold entrepreneurs who sailed to the ends of the earth in search of wealth. If that wealth happened to be taken from a Spanish treasure fleet, or if there was a whiff of privateering and freebootery about their operations, that was all part of the game...
There is more than a slight whiff of jailhouse self-pity: Joe loves Kitty, goes to the lockup, survives the schemes of bad villains with the help of good villains, and gets out to find true-blue Kitty and the child he has never seen waiting for him. The best of the book is Morgan's wildly reinvented con lingo. His ear fails him occasionally, when he uses lace-curtain language -- "caparisoned," "implacable mien" -- that some editor should have yanked from the manuscript with tongs. But at other times he's cooking: "Saturday night movies in the Gym were...