Word: bleakest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Should the contras be defeated in battle or expelled from Honduras, or both, Reagan's strategists see the bleakest of choices. Some warn that the U.S. might have to consider an American invasion of Nicaragua in the year ahead. The alternative would be an unsatisfactory political settlement with the Sandinistas. Some strategists sound as if they are not quite sure which would be worse...
...bleakest of Swedes did, in fact, think of women as "whores," including his three wives. In brilliant but vitriolic plays like Miss Julie (an aristocrat lusts after her servant) and Creditors (hell in the shape of a triangle), Strindberg practices his own advice to other authors on the treatment of female characters: "Accuse them, blacken them; abuse them so that they haven't a clean spot--that is dramatic!" His second wife, Frida, an Austrian journalist, compared marriage to Strindberg to "a death ride over crackling ice and bottomless depths." There is little evidence that his first wife, Siri...
While other industries enjoyed a banner year, banking endured some of its bleakest times since the Great Depression. Saddled with shaky loans to oil drillers, farmers and foreign governments, major banks suffered a 30% decline in profits during the first three quarters of 1984, and 79 institutions failed. In addition, Government regulators put 817 of the 14,700 U.S. banks on their "problem list." The worst problem was Continental Illinois, which started the year as the seventh largest U.S. bank. It would have collapsed under its bad loans if the U.S. Government had not provided a $4.5 billion bailout...
...deep thought. Hearts and Bones explores the gap between thought and feeling. Think Too Much is a classic statement of the quandary ("Have you ever experienced a period of grace/ When your brain just takes a seat behind your face") that keeps the record buoyant even at its bleakest. A piece of compact virtuosity, Hearts and Bones ends with a tribute to John Lennon that is a little like a streamlined time transport. "It was the year of the Beatles/ It was the year of the Stones/ It was 1964..." Nearly 20 years on, and it seems like a good...
...novels, since neither clergymen nor anthropologists figure in it-is about a vain, middle-aged beauty who drives out her tenant, Miss Foxe, an ancient who lugs buckets of paraffin up several flights of stairs to heat her top-floor flat. In Quartet in Autumn, Pym's bleakest and most critically acclaimed book, two women and two men who share an office regard retirement with a collective dread. Their work may be inconsequential and boring, but it is their only real hold on life...