Word: besting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...impossible to describe the complete pleasure her smile conveyed. Perhaps she gets a bonus for being a particularly petty bureaucrat. Perhaps she resents foreigners and their privileges. A Chinese train's best accommodations, the "soft sleeper" compartment, in which two bunk beds actually sport linen, are reserved for foreigners and high party and government officials. I could understand her hating such preferential treatment, but then again, she and her colleagues do pretty well because of it. For notwithstanding my status as a foreigner, the "soft sleeper" car was "sold out" until a kind official laid a carton of cigarettes...
...bookstores that one can best see how daily life has outgrown the political system's controls, how the campaign against "spiritual pollution," so rhetorically fierce, is flouted with such abandon. While elsewhere in China, government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations...
...China). Like the young man break-dancing to a blaring Madonna album amid a few hundred elderly tai chi practitioners at a Shanghai park. Like the reserve and civility evident in personal relations that rarely translate to civic responsibility. Like the more intractable tensions of incorporating the best of capitalism while preserving socialism -- tensions that have arisen because of, rather than in spite of, Deng's economic reforms. Like everything about the ghost marriage and those who celebrate it. All this and more reflect the clash of modernity and tradition and the exquisite balancing acts required when a nation persists...
When former Speaker of the House Thomas (Tip) O'Neill retired after more than 50 years in politics, he had only $2,900 in the bank. But today O'Neill is faring far better, not just because of his best-selling book, Man of the House, but also due to his status as a trendy spokesman. O'Neill has appeared in ads for American Express and Miller Lite beer, among others. In current TV commercials, he can be seen rising from an open suitcase on the bed of a Quality Inns International motel...
Raymond Chandler influenced the American detective novel so strongly that even his imitators have imitators. Among the best of the second-generation models is Robert B. Parker, 57, whose private investigator, Spenser, shares Philip Marlowe's gruff chivalry and, like Chandler's "Galahad of the gutter," bears the surname of an Elizabethan literary figure...