Sometimes as the year winds down, she's dreaming of the future, sometimes thinking about the past, sometimes focused on the last few seconds, but always, as was true from her very first moment at this website, she offers some version of hope in the face of a reality that others find almost too grim and obdurate to consider.
Perhaps it was too expressive a face to be pretty — the obdurate and the yielding at odds in it.
When "The Dirty Dozen" came out, America was stuck in Vietnam, and the New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt responded in a way that seems familiar: Like nearly all American commercial war movies now — "The Sand Pebbles" was another — "The Dirty Dozen" is too thick and cautious to have anything as obdurate as an attitude toward what it shows.
Gibson looked at him incredulously and said, "Why, hell, the only way you could ever hurt me is if you happened to be a pretty good fastball hitter!" One longtime Cardinals writer said to me, "Bob was a thorny, obdurate personality, and there weren't too many people who were crazy about him.
It was also a rewarding exercise for students of obdurate defence, particularly the final.
Wales were, as ever, game and obdurate, but at times they were also dumb.
As irascible, self-interested and obdurate as he could be, Mr. Davis was also self-aware.
The Germans also sank the minesweeper and damaged the destroyers, Obedient, and Obdurate.
But at its heart, just as with Philip II, was the same political flaw: the obdurate belief of a leader that the virtue of the policy, as he saw it, transcended its all too evident failure.
