Word: bitted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under interrogation, quite a few members of John le Carre's vast and devoted reading public might confess a gnawing secret: the wish that the author would get on with his stories a bit more speedily than he has been doing for the past 15 or so years. Ever since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), in this view, Le Carre has been unduly shifting emphasis from action to atmospherics; his espionage plots remained splendidly inventive, but they arrived splintered into ambiguities worthy of Henry James. Which was fine, maybe, for those who wanted their cold war shenanigans decked...
Some people mistrust collections of essays on the ground that they are often fragmentary and monotonous, but it is precisely the diversity of Levi's pensees (artfully translated by Raymond Rosenthal) that makes them so entertaining. That and the basic quality of Levi's mind, skeptical but sympathetic, a bit melancholy but witty; one feels that he is a friend. About all those beetles, Levi speculates that they may be the creatures destined to take over the postnuclear world. "Many millions of years will have to pass," he writes, "before a beetle particularly loved by God . . . will find written...
...about two-thirds in the number of Warsaw Pact tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces. After the reductions, which would be much heavier on the Soviet than the U.S. side, NATO and Warsaw Pact troops and weaponry would supposedly be equalized by 1996-97 at a level a bit below that now fielded by NATO. Still, Gorbachev essentially only filled in the details on a proposal made by Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in March, moving closer to NATO's negotiating positions and repackaging them as his own. While he was at it, Gorbachev tossed in a hook. He called...
...that their children will get a typical 35-hour-a-week Japanese high school curriculum, including five classes each of English, math and Japanese and four of science and social studies. American students are welcome, but most of the classes will be taught in Japanese. Language was still a bit of a problem for T.M.G. tenth-grader Junich Hasebe, 15, who nonetheless seemed eager to learn about his host country. "I like America very much," he said in halting English. "Large country...
...what it was like in personal terms. I knew about them because slaves who wrote about their lives mentioned them, and white people wrote about them. There's a wonderful diary of the Burr family in which he talks about his daily life and says, "Put the bit on Jenny today." He says that about 19 times in six months -- and he was presumably an enlightened slave owner. Slave-ship captains also wrote a lot of memoirs, so it's heavily documented...