Word: wren
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...sure, but a happy one, whose graces and goodness had hitherto shone only in a small corner of a great church. Asks Archbishop Stanislaus Lokuang of Taipei with evident skepticism: "Will it be possible to find a man with the same qualities?" Though Luciani once described himself as a "wren" among bishops, his papacy revealed him as a rather rarer bird. His reputation for doctrinal conservatism made him acceptable to the traditionalists who voted on the first ballot for Genoa's ultraconservative Giuseppe Cardinal Siri. His firm stand against Italian Communists won him the backing of the pro-Christian Democrat...
There are Long Wharf, Hillhouse High, Arts and Letters, and Quadrangle, all of which stand for New Haven and Yale, from which he graduated in 1929 and to which he has given more than $40 million in cash. Then there are Christopher Wren, Debrett, King's Parade, Land's End, Tower of London. They represent England and the dignified 18th century values treasured most by Mellon, who was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire in 1974. Literature, another Mellon love, gallops as Knight's Tale, Winter's Tale, Canterbury Tale and Love for Love...
...Suga, the tiny Japanese master hairdresser, approaches, and Tiegs bends her knees, lowering her head so that he can give it a last swipe with his brush. A small, wren-colored woman, a stylist, darts up, makes an odd little ducking gesture that may be obeisance, and slips a bracelet on the racing sloop's left arm. Photographer Seltzer, a big, bald, hard-looking man, lies on his belly, chest soothed by a pillow, and begins to talk in the style parodied in Blow-Up: "Good, good, wonderful, great...
Such pyrotechnics fizzle as often as they go off, but Berger gets steady comic mileage out of built-in absurdities. Since the detective is clearly the butt of a massive finagle, nothing he meets is what it seems to be. An apparently moronic cop nabs Wren with an abrupt display of erudition: "Did you cause that man to shuffle off his mortal coil?" In the twinkling of a transition, innocent young schoolgirls become a team of orgiastic courtesans. Even when Wren finally tracks down the villain who has been tormenting him, his deduction #151;based on impeccable evidence-is wrong...
...novel's relentless japery is almost sufficient to drown out some bleak thoughts on the state of the urban world. Seen through Wren's eyes, New York City is a ruin in which civility and beauty are relentlessly stamped out. "I suspected that the entire block," he notes, "chosen because it was handsome, had been condemned for demolition and cleared of tenants." Noting that automated garages are replacing the older type, thus putting "churlish" attendants out of work, Wren comments: "One more bit of the inhumane is replaced by the non-human." The author strikes this mordant note...