Word: characterization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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His example strengthened democracy everywhere. "He became a legendary hero," the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued. "Peoples far beyond the frontiers of the U.S. rightly looked to him as the most genuine and unswerving spokesman of democracy. He had all the character and energy and skill of the dictators, and...
21. "She was far more than a clown. Her mobile face could register a whole dictionary of emotions; her comic timing was unmatched; her devotion to the truth of her character never flagged. She was a tireless perfectionist."
The Mahatma, the Great Soul, endures in the best part of our minds, where our ideals are kept: the embodiment of human rights and the creed of nonviolence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is something else, an eccentric of complex, contradictory and exhausting character most of us hardly know. It is fashionable...
1914. World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action...
The onslaught is unfair. But even ardent Jeffersonians admit that the man was an insoluble puzzle. The contradictions in his character and his ideas could be breathtaking. That the author of the Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal") not only owned and worked slaves at Monticello but also...