Like the Ciceronian Latin favored by the intellectuals of the Renaissance, 18th-century French "was a language in itself inconvenient, difficult, aristocratic and literary," inseparable from "a bon ton in manners, from a certain bearing in society, and from a quality of wit, nourished on literature, in conversation".
She's a natural Balanchine stylist, with qualities of wit, voluptuousness and even glee that make her gifts of attack and sweep become multifaceted.
His epigrams and epistolary poems (épîtres), in particular, display those qualities of wit, intellectual refinement, and sincerity and naturalness that were to characterize the French use of these genres for the next two centuries.
He remained a sardonic and good humoured spectator of contemporary affairs, taking pleasure in the various honours which came his way, especially the chancellorship of the University of Oxford, an office to which he had been elected in 1960 and which gave ample scope for the display of his characteristic qualities of wit and generosity.
In the Aria I duet, Maria Kowroski played the ballerina's amazing back-arches and other acrobatic feats with a new quality of wry wit.
No, the thing we admire about Mr. McGrady, who died on Sunday, age 78, is more the quality of his wit and his journalism than the deathless awfulness of his fiction.
The quality of campaign wit, however, appears to have deteriorated since then: Consider the John Kerry Political Pet Toy, with a likeness of the senator under the slogan "You Can't Get Even but Your Pet Can," or the "Wipe Your Tush With Bush" toilet paper.
Indeed, such was the quality of the wit of the two hosts, the ceremony should be nominated for some sort of writing gong itself next year.
His confidence owed to timing — a brief renaissance of ceramic art in Southern California in the late fifties, led by Price's teacher Peter Voulkos — and his quality to wit and (no other word will quite do) genius.
A native of Montana, drawn naturally to Western characters, Mr. Markus's fashion pictures have a rare quality of warmth and wit.
James's friends in London also became alert to how little his family actually knew about him, and how uneasy they might become at discovering in his letters what Anesko calls "his most distinctive qualities: his devastating sharpness of wit, his extravagant inventions of intimacy, his Rabelasian powers of innuendo".
