Word: briskness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...customers by two to one and sales assistants outnumbering security guards by the same margin. The neighboring Rigby & Peller shop, offering the classic lingerie styles reputed to find favor with the Queen alongside racier, French maid-themed numbers, is also deserted, but two perky salesgirls claim weekend trade is brisk. "Once people have tried our bras, they always come back," says one. "Everybody wants that uplift." It's a sentiment gloomy British retailers and their gloomier customers must surely endorse...
Piles of red brick clutter the roadsides. Stacks of concrete drainage pipes fill parking lots. Newly resurfaced roads snake past rows of temporary housing, while stores do a brisk trade in paint and window frames. Like countless places in China, this corner of central Sichuan province is undergoing a building boom. But this is no typical growth story. When I was here six months ago, bodies jutted from the pancaked floors of collapsed buildings and lined rubble-strewn streets. Tens of thousands of homeless crowded into sports stadiums, and millions more slept in tents. The highway was riven with cracks...
Piles of red bricks clutter the roadsides. Stacks of concrete drainage pipes fill parking lots, while stores do a brisk trade in paint and window frames. Like countless other places in China, this corner of central Sichuan province is undergoing a building boom. But this is no typical growth story. When I was here six months ago, bodies jutted from the pancaked floors of collapsed buildings and lined rubble-strewn streets. Tens of thousands of homeless crowded into sports stadiums, and millions more slept in tents. The surface of the Zipingba Reservoir was covered with a brackish film from...
Well, an action figure, real or plastic, is just what this brisk exercise (the shortest Bond film ever) needs. Director Marc Forster--whose résumé includes a lot of gimmicky art-house fare, from Finding Neverland to The Kite Runner--does much better when he has no moral in tow; he can concentrate on shepherding the second-unit stunt work and setting a tempo of nearly nonstop suspense. What's lost in reverberations from the series' blithe old movies is gained in daredevil vigor...
...novel that any critic could describe as brisk or taut. (Not like all those other brisk, taut 898-page novels.) Bolaño is addicted to digressions, unsolved mysteries and seemingly extraneous details that actually do turn out to be extraneous. He loves trotting out characters we will never encounter a second time--a habit that can be exhausting. And whenever a character falls asleep, the reader should prepare to hear about his dreams...