Word: heroic
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...coloration depending on who plays the two parts. Barbara Baxley's Emily is crisp, managerial as well as motherly and yet touchingly vulnerable. George Grizzard's Ralph is Little Boy Blue, destined never to grow up yet always capable of a last-ditch courage bordering on the heroic. It is the most compassionate portrayal of a man that Grizzard has yet achieved...
Another fear had nothing to do with gay people, but with men, generally, at Harvard. Harvard men are the most threatened, most insecure men in the world. Harvard men are incredibly afraid to be less than totally masculine, cool, heroic, with it, sophisticated, charming. They try hard, too hard, to compensate for their insecurity by posing as confident and self-assured. And because Harvard men are highly skilled socially, they largely succeed. But in the process, they scare the hell out of each other--each one is convinced that everyone else's calm front is real, and that only...
...heroic materialism, Courbet was one of the ancestors of cubism. But his sense of reality extended beyond material, to social organization; hence the storm over A Burial at Ornans. In that black frieze punctuated by village faces, all held under the chalk bluffs of the distant landscape as beneath a sarcophagus lid, Courbet realized a whole rural society: not "noble peasants" mourning in a generalized Arcadia, but real people. The painting revealed, in country life, the same kind of bourgeois complexity that existed in the city. This contradicted the Parisians' idea of rural harmony and was, for that reason...
...some firemen, picket duty took second place to heroic professionalism in the face of sudden danger. When troopers failed to check a blaze spreading through London's St. Andrew's Hospital, six strikers donned breathing equipment and rushed into the burning building. "For God's sake, it was a hospital," said one. "This was no time for striking." At week's end, with no settlement in sight, it looked as if the main thing separating Britain from a major fire disaster was luck...
...Post has not always been heroic--and for a long time it wasn't even a very good newspaper. In "The Washington Post: The First 100 Years," Chalmers M. Roberts tells the story of how The Post pulled itself out of sensationalism and bankruptcy earlier in this century to become the Pulitzer prizewinner it is today. Roberts, who wrote for The Post from the 1930s until his retirement in 1971, wrote The Washington Post as that paper's official centennial history. He has masterfully avoided the dullness that marks many commissioned histories, and his book is a fascinating, straightforward account...