Word: barley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...task of deciding which it is initially falls on British intelligence; the notebooks have fetched up in London, intended for a seedy and temporarily missing publisher named Bartholomew Scott Blair, known familiarly as Barley. The first priority is to find him. The second is to grill him until he admits his involvement in a duplicitous plot. Failing that, the third imperative is to enlist Barley as a spy and send him off to discover more about his mysterious Soviet informant...
...publisher seems particularly ill-suited for such an assignment. His life so far has been a model of irresponsibility: heavy drinking, an accumulation of debts, ex-wives and mistresses. But Barley is not the only odd man out. Witnessing and narrating these events is Horatio Benedict dePalfrey, a lawyer who has spent the past 20 years of his career papering over the questionable deeds of the secret service, mopping up after the people he calls espiocrats. "I am quickly dealt with," he writes of himself. "You need not stumble on me long." To the contrary. He, "old Harry...
...Barley passes muster with the British crew and later with the more suspicious contingent from the CIA, but not before protesting, "I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over." Back in the Soviet Union, seeking out the woman who had forwarded the presumptive secrets and trying to get at their source, he encounters glasnost and perestroika everywhere he turns. One Moscow literary type wonders, "When will they start repressing us again to make us comfortable?" Another informs him, "We have no more problems! In the old days we had to assume that everything was a mess...
...unglamorous oat bran has experienced a jump of 600% in sales this year for the Quaker Oats Co. alone. Health buffs are sprinkling this supposed miracle on virtually everything, even high-fashion muffins. Only the farmers seem unenchanted. Oat bran still brings a far lower price than corn and barley, and so is not likely to be given more acreage...
...drought-weary farmers in the West, hot weather and high winds have brought another threat to this year's dwindling crop. Hordes of Russian wheat aphids, which thrive on dry wheat and barley fields, are rampaging through 15 Western states, from California and Arizona to Montana. The tiny stalk suckers (size: 0.1 in.) have nearly wiped out harvests in some fields. The bugs are natives of the Soviet Union, Iran and Afghanistan, but were transplanted to Mexico by unknown means in 1980 and have been moving north ever since. Last year the insects caused $36 million in damage across...