Shriver also sometimes sacrifices drama for polemical rants about matters not really related to the plot.
No matter how polemical Bruegel is supposed to be (historians insist that he is satirising gluttony and lust), his fantastic group revelries never seem less than loving for all the ungainliness of the cavorting blokes and the yammering women.
But what's missing from this positive and positivist mode of the politique des auteurs, the critical practice of so-called auteurism — and, for that matter, from its negative, polemical, political side — is its mighty struggle with the world, the cinema, and the New Wave critics themselves.
But polemical approaches to the subject of religion are corrosive and destructive.
In a passage that particularly impressed his hearers, he acknowledged that there had been "failures" on the part of Catholics in the past, referring to the now outmoded polemical approach to reunion and to insistence on matters of prestige.
In this, as in other politically charged matters, Morris has, over the years, become less polemical but no less insistent.
Despite its topic, the exhibit is not polemical, he said.
Its structure is somewhat similar to that of the Elements of Law, though it also contains lengthy discussions of matters of scriptural interpretation, and it is probably the most overtly polemical of Hobbes's major works.
However, in Book XI of the polemical treatise against Proclus (see below, 3.1) he jettisons the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic conception of prime matter and posits as the most fundamental level of his ontology 'the three-dimensional', as he calls it, i.e. indeterminately extended mass.
Applebaum is not so much polemical as just pained by all that happened; her essential revelation – that Marxist ideology, mad though it seems, really mattered even for the mediocrities who enforced it – is a useful reminder for anyone still inclined to imagine that ideas don't make history.
