But Ms. Racette would attribute such immediacy to her refreshingly old-fashioned preparatory regimen.

The progress from academic representation to radical breakthrough has a momentum and span that seems more late 19th century than mid-20th - and refreshingly old-fashioned for these postmodern times.

Selzer's fiction is refreshingly old-fashioned: his prose is formal, his ironies straightforward.

"Selzer's fiction is refreshingly old-fashioned: his prose is formal, his ironies straightforward," Tobin Harshaw wrote here in 1998.

The room keys were refreshingly old-fashioned, big and clunky.

"a refreshingly old-fashioned belief in the virtue of human community".

"Mr. Jacques has woven an energetic, if somewhat simple-minded, fantasy on a refreshingly old-fashioned subject: the struggle between good and evil."

Ms. Nussbaum's love of literature and insistence on its social value are refreshingly old-fashioned.

One part of Audi's comeback strategy is refreshingly old-fashioned: the 1995 models are 7 to 25 percent cheaper than comparably equipped 94's.