After a fervent speech on character in which he challenged Air Force Academy cadets to weed out those who would sexually prey upon women in their ranks, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche said tonight that the protocols put in place a decade ago to prevent such attacks had failed and needed to be replaced.
Declan Kiberd, the leading Yeats scholar, teases out the complexities of Yeats's character: fervent for independence, yet no democrat; a mythologiser of women who could not establish happy relationships; a lyric poet with steely ambition; the Irishman who failed to learn the language, spent much of his time in England, and never went to the pub.
But these are also the most fervent defenders of characters like Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton.
There's an essence of astonishment, of spontaneous and innocent wonder at work in Hess's films; it comes through in his discerning, concentrated, frontally direct images as well as in his characters' fervent peculiarity and innocent obstinacy.
Mr. Tisdale likewise deploys a ripe accent as the fervent Dexel, a borderline stereotypical character drawn more from Quentin Tarantino movies than from life.
In a centenary tribute in The Times Gerald Larner commented that Poulenc's prediction was wrong, and that in 1999 the composer was widely celebrated for both sides of his musical character: "both the fervent Catholic and the naughty boy, for both the Gloria and Les Biches, both Les Dialogues des Carmélites and Les Mamelles de Tirésias".
Tchaikovsky scorned Brahms as "a giftless bastard", while Elgar declared that "the unvarying breadth and grandeur of his ideas marks him out as the true successor of Beethoven .As is often the case with such fervent opposition, a person's view of Brahms depended less on the actual character of his music than on how it was described or pigeon-holed.
Or on the CD: I've also noticed that those who have absorbed "Dreams" via the audiobook version, read by the author (who reproduces his characters' accents), are the most fervent of all.
It's the chink in the armour of their otherwise cool, logical embodiment of authority: a fervent and unshakeable belief that cabbage is character-building or the school cat can speak.
The album's characters include the "Dogs", representing fervent capitalists, the "Pigs", symbolizing political corruption, and the "Sheep", who represent the exploited.
Action sequences are tipsy with testosterone (male comrades exchange "fervent man hugs"), but when it comes to character development, every expense is spared.
