Word: afoot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dictatorial and the insecure have always been fond of the oath as a way to enforce orthodoxy, to lay down a prior restraint upon people's opinions. During the 1950s the loyalty oath turned into a destructively pervasive American genre, with a legion of earnest patriots afoot, like the ghost in Hamlet, crying, "Swear...
...Dmitri, 19, a concert pianist, were on tour with the U.S.S.R. Television and Radio Symphony Orchestra in West Germany. Though Maxim Shostakovich seemed emotionally strained as he conducted a composition by his father, few if any in the audience the Bavarian city of Fürth suspected what was afoot. During a post-concert dinner party in a nearby Nuremberg hotel, the Shostakoviches eluded the Soviet functionaries guarding the exits and slipped away to the local police station. There Maxim announced their intention to stay in the West. Later he called his old friend Rostropovich in Washington who in turn...
...Carter perhaps the most dangerous President since James Buchanan. On their first postvictory visit to Washington, the Reagans went to dinner at the Wills' in Chevy Chase. This inspired Garry Trudeau to a cutting Doonesbury cartoon. In a column last week Will good-humoredly noted: "Fearful rumors are afoot that I may abandon the columnist's basic stance of thorough disapproval of all conduct but his own." The dinner "was a small matter, but large enough to fill to overflowing the minds of some people . . . Will this columnist be as critical of Reagan's Administration...
...occasion is always a night's adventure. Dour guards, who prowl the fenced perimeters at other times, paste on smiles and put on star-spangled uniforms. The heavy doors that are usually closed are wide open. But this night there was something unusual afoot. The commemoration of the Russian Revolution may have proved to be the first significant social and diplomatic event of the soon-to-arrive Reagan Administration...