And, atop it, in the Kremlin, is Boris Yeltsin, who personifies all those contradictory qualities and impulses.
Unfortunately, the notion that contradictory qualities can coexist in the same man seems beyond the authors' grasp.
Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative.
For Plato, Ms. Lichtenstein writes, color painting has "all the contradictory qualities of the pharmakon," a "magic and maleficent" drug that is both a remedy and a poison.
The wit, economy and detachment that she achieved in her fiction also played in her personality, and there, too, they masked contradictory qualities.
He loved our part of the south and his work reflected southerners' innately contradictory qualities of ambiguity and plain-spokenness, cruelty and kindness, illumination and obscurity.
In medals, crowns, haloes and rings, gold has simultaneously represented the sometimes contradictory qualities of heroism, wealth, power, divinity and purity.
So he was to his contemporaries, many of whom found him, as the actor David Garrick put it, "a mixture so odd" of contradictory qualities.
Together, these apparently contradictory qualities comprise the skill set for managing your most valuable personal resource — your attention — in a hyper-connected age.
