Word: passionless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...traditional education (concluding at Oxford) that followed, giving rise to Rose Macaulay's frequent literary treatment of the struggles of the free spirit against rigid mores. The witty, bloodless, polished writer that emerged was-in words she used to describe a character in Staying With Relations-"ironic, amused, passionless, detached, elegantly celibate . . . a traveled European, a bland mocker, a rather mincing young gentlewoman...
Thus did De Gaulle present himself this week to the National Assembly for investiture as Premier of France. Then, in clear, passionless tones, he went on to outline the rest of his program. Items...
...theme, he works variations-and even a fantasia-upon it. He can jiggle his royal puppet in the classic role of the Patriot King; he can even make a kind of If-I-Were-King of Magnus. The Socialist Bernard can act a Strong Man on the throne, a Passionless Shepherd in the boudoir. The disbeliever in monarchy can suggest that a constitutional monarch be flagrantly unconstitutional, and can have him retain his throne by threatening to abdicate and prove ten times as troublesome in Parliament...
...Frying Pan is of a different sort. Catholic priest and the wife of his best friend quite suddenly find that they are in love with each other. Here is where a naturalist would lead his characters into the widest fights of criticism: the unfortunate, quite passionless husband would be painted in a pitiless, scoffing manner, and certainly the love scenes between priest and wife could be ignored in all their sordid and demented glory. But O'Connor merely comments, "He (the husband) as he really was, a man at war with his animal nature, longing for some high, solitary existence...
...persuasions" to sign a phony confession of spying for the British and Americans. He refused, and then began four years of prison camps in Siberia and Turkestan. His brief descriptions of Lubianka, the slave camps and the tortures that were devised to break him are set down in the passionless reporting of a recorder who has known terror so well that it has become conventional...