irreproachable

Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried.

A former New Dealer, an academic, an internationalist, he was the type who offended Cohn, but he was almost comically irreproachable.

Minnesota had sent him to Washington not as a version of Frank Capra’s sweetly naive Mr. Smith but as an independent, ethically irreproachable successor to the storied Hubert H. Humphrey, the ebullient Democrat who had returned to the Senate after losing the 1968 presidential race and whose widow, Muriel Humphrey, had been holding her husband’s unexpired term.

In that frame of mind, “Out of Africa” — with its intense civility, its irreproachable landscapes, the tensions of its faintly doomed love story, which is not about love, really, but about possession, and its twin superstars — seems to be just the thing for famished culture mavens at Christmastime.

“Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character,” she wrote.