Word: waspish
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...truth one of the most radical leaders Britain has ever had. Thatcher could not abide the cozy and mildly corrupt arrangements that - as she saw it - had condemned post-1945 Britain to a managed decline, and was determined to blow them up. As one of her more waspish M.P.s once said, Thatcher could not see an institution without "hitting it with her handbag." But she never understood that once you removed the need to show deference to any institution - the BBC, the labor unions, the professions - you had undermined them all. If deference to the established order...
...contrast, while Harvard has been a Boston institution since its Puritan beginnings, the local accent has never caught on here. Instead, Harvard has historically embraced the more decadent, waspish ethos of the Boston Brahmin elite. We live in a land of regattas and finals clubs—far more John Forbes Kerry than Will Hunting. If there is an accent that has defined Harvard over the years, it is one of haughty pretension that characterizes the sermons of Reverend Peter J. Gomes...
Once you’ve found a subdivision that sounds like a WASPish Connecticut country club, you’ll be perfectly prepared to take in the grotesqueness of your surroundings. A guidebook, however, is entirely unnecessary. These subdivisions are filled with the easily identifiable domicile sometimes referred to as “the McMansion...
...cordiality, Rice was a critic of the Clinton Administration's policies and habits. She had said as much, in the kind of language that one of Oscar Wilde's more waspish characters might have used. In a famous 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, she insisted that the "Clinton Administration has assiduously avoided implementing an agenda" that "separates the important from the trivial." In an interview with the New York Times just before the election, she dismissed Clinton's affection for peacekeeping by stating that "we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." The Bush team...
...that destroyed a third of Venice's population of around 175,000, the work was an attempt to "influence God, to plead with him." The aged Titian succumbed, leaving the picture unfinished. Titian's reputation was bolstered by good public relations. Writer Pietro Aretino, whose volumes of flattering and waspish letters ensured a wary respect from the highest in the land, liked to boost his friend's work, describing every new portrait even when he hadn't actually seen it. Between them they stimulated demand. "If you were anyone you wanted to be portrayed, and portrayed by Titian," Jaff...