Word: besets
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FRENCH President Georges Pompidou struck almost the same theme when he declared that "Europe is a reality, with its own personality." Yet, in their two days of meetings last week, the political leaders of Europe demonstrated that the Common Market is still beset by the divisions that have handicapped it since its founding in 1958. France is determined to maintain a loose confederation of nation states while the other members are, in varying degrees, committed to the creation of a Europe that is united politically as well as economically...
...compiled by three analytically trained assistants); and he carefully studied Mein Kampf. His conclusion: Hitler was "probably a neurotic psychopath bordering on schizophrenia," or, in simpler terms, the Fuhrer was not insane but was emotionally sick and lacked normal inhibitions against antisocial behavior. A desperately unhappy man, he was beset by fears, doubts, loneliness and guilt, and spent his whole life in an unsuccessful attempt to compensate for feelings of helplessness and inferiority...
Strolling through the Yard between classes, the freshman is beset by bullhorns blaring names of "war criminals" and other "enemies of the people." Upon returning to his room, he finds an equally mindless communique from an Administration figure about some controversy that began back in 1968 and is not even fully understood by its protagonists...
Ernest Jones, official biographer of Sigmund Freud, seemed to agree with those sentiments when he wrote in 1930: "Chess...is a play substitute for the art of war." But in the same essay, The Problem of Paul Morphy, which discussed the paranoia that beset the American chess prodigy of the 1850s, he also moved Freud's much-debated interpretation of Oedipus onto the chessboard. Morphy, in Jones' somewhat questionable theory, had to sublimate a strong Oedipal urge to "kill the father." His own flesh-and-blood father was already dead, but Morphy had a surrogate father, Howard Staunton...
...number of Europeans on the road, on the rails or in the air this summer has reached a record 75 million, triple the level of 15 years ago. Largely because much of Europe was beset by the wettest and coldest July in a decade -the worst in France in 90 years-the hordes have been moving south to the Mediterranean in greater numbers and later in the summer than ever before...