Mr. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, took in these arguments with a benign smile.
As Mr. Edelstein summed it up simply, with a benign smile, "without work, I'd probably be dead".
In the new post-Citizens world, money equals speech, as Scalia himself says with a benign smile.
Using revealing new material from those closest to Ike, Mr. Thomas describes a cagey, caustic, volatile figure whose benign smile was his biggest bluff of all.
"I do not know where you got information that my family is connected to a privileged group," he said, as always answering with a benign smile and a slightly surprised look in his eyes.
The result is that "royal correspondents" tend eventually to resemble the most saccharine of vicars: presiding over births, marriages and deaths among the Windsor clan with a benign smile and breathy delivery.
7am: Breakfast television, and an unhinged-looking woman waves erratically in front of a map, addressing us with the fixed, benign smile of an airhostess breaking bad news to a child.
We mustn't go back to the kind of medicine in which the benign smile of the doctor provides comfort because the cures are somewhere between hypothesis and quackery Many of the great doctors have been writers, and those who have not have required writers to set down their insights.
Bibhuti accommodated Merton's assault with such grace – shifting his stance to expand the target zone, accepting each kick with a benign smile – that my concerns for his safety and for his mental health were surpassed by admiration and even a degree of envy.
We agreed that this was certainly the case, but she shook her head and, putting on an uncharacteristically sour expression, said, "No, we say, he deserved it," as if she were speaking of Robespierre and the guillotine; after all, this was the woman who earlier had assured us, with a benign smile, that the living members of the Académie française were "all dead".
As for Sugar, what amuses her? She's regarding Caroline with a benign smile, like a mother who can't quite believe what simple things delight her child, but it's Caroline who's the mother here, and Sugar a girl still in her teens.
