Word: placid
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Thanks to Hitler, England can now boast of having the largest Jewish community in Europe. Currently 450,000 strong, it is a proud, placid and curiously mixed branch of Judaism. Some of its members are descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions for the safety of Cromwell's England in the 17th century. Others belong to the wealthy, literate Anglo-Jewish families, such as the banking Rothschilds, who began to leave the ghettos of Europe 100 years later and came to exert great economic and political power in Britain. Liberal in outlook, sometimes casual...
...scandal takes place in a placid little provincial backwater, on the surface of which floats a handful of dissipated notables trying to forget how bored they are. Everyone is caught in a pointless, narcotic whirlpool of wine and frivolity, and everyone is constantly being dragged down into silly flirtations and seductions...
Most of the Caribbean islands throb to the rallying cries of independence and nationalism. But the French West Indies - Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guadeloupe's six dependencies - seem as placid as the emerald waters that lap their pearl-white beaches. In the westernmost backwater of Charles de Gaulle's French community 4,250 miles from Paris, natives and tourists sit at sunny, sidewalk tables placidly nibbling crusty French bread and sipping flat French beer; in narrow streets, the scent of bougainvillaea mingles with the fumes of beeping Simcas and Peugeots. And when le grand Charles stops over in Guadeloupe...
...things done, keeps his passions well below the surface. His pride is deep enough so that he does not have to swallow it when he must compromise. He is a steady and persistent man, with a shrewd understanding of people. Wilkins knows the facts of political life; if his placid exterior disturbs those who believe his cause demands anger, it is indispensable when, says, a conservative legislator must be cajoled into supporting a civil rights bill. Wilkins inspires respect and profound confidence, not emotional faith. After a few hours with him, one feels certain that Wilkins and men like...
Trillin speaks with a low and calm voice; he is not writing about an abstract Negro on a magazine cover who stands firmly, muscles taut, eyes forward. Underneath the placid prose is another figure, the intelligent Southern Negro, who, unlike his contemporaries from the North, cannot go home to Boston, New York, or Springfield after his year of working in the South is over...