Word: beset
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...pronoun I--the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously exalted by his diminished status...
...project is extremely time-consuming. Every letter is picked from innumerable drawers of type to be strung into a line on a 'composing stick'. Almost all the surfaces in the room are piled under with tiny spears of lead, each tipped with its own character. The tables look beset by a plague of silver locusts. When the letters have been collected they are laid flat on the bed of the press, where the text is meticulously spaced out and held together by flat strips of metal called 'furniture'. The arrangements of this spacing material form the almost invisible choices...
...Diverse setting" in this context refers to diversity within the student body. But the same kinds of problems attracting minorities have beset universities hiring for their top positions...
...sudden turn taken by an enfeebled President preoccupied with survival. "The Kremlin's not playing chess," says Alexander Oslon, Russia's leading pollster. "They're playing checkers--they're living one day at a time." With the end of Yeltsin's second term 10 months away, the Family is beset by fear of humiliation, if not prosecution. ("The Ceausescu scenario," a Kremlin staff member calls it, recalling the collapse of Romania's dictatorship in 1989.) Ironically, the gravest threat may be neither Luzhkov nor the Chechen rebels but a corps of Swiss prosecutors that has been probing allegations of financial...
...might never vote at all become convinced that their freedoms, their very being, will be jeopardized if they do not vote Smith in and Jones out. Once convinced, these folks in effect become the NRA in the shadows. They are the defense-oriented "little guys" of the American people, beset by Big Government, big laws and rich liberals who want to take away the only power they have...