Word: ch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Editor Robert Phelps has made the most of Colette's sensuous prose. Thirty-one stories in this volume have never before appeared in English, and 29 others have received fresh translations. Devotees of Gigi, Chéri and The Vagabond will encounter some of the author's familiar characters as she first conceived them: ravishing courtesans, indolent young gigolos and harried music-hall artists...
Colette's preparatory sketches for her masterworks Chéri (1920) and The Last of Chéri (1926) show how hard she labored to achieve an effect of lapidary simplicity and ease. The fledgling gigolo Chéri made his first appearance as a runny-nosed boy called Clouk. "When I gave birth to this beautiful young man," the author later recalled, "he was ugly, something of a runt, and sickly, suffering from swollen adenoids." He bored her. As a result, "Clouk awoke from a few months' sleep, cast off his pale little slough like a molting...
...relishes such tales, not only about notable discoverers like Columbus and Magellan but also about the half-forgotten Cheng Ho, a Chinese eunuch who set forth in the 15th century with a gigantic fleet of more than 300 vessels and nearly 40,000 men. Exploring as far as Zanzibar, Chêng Ho brought back to the imperial zoo its first giraffe, which the Chinese were convinced was a unicorn, whose horn was said to provide the most powerful of aphrodisiacs...
...neighboring El Salvador, the nation's two highest-ranking prelates became targets of a campaign of intimidation by death squads. In a terse communique delivered to a radio station, the rightist Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Anti-Communist Brigade warned Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas and Monsignor Gregorio Rosa Chávez that they would suffer "drastic consequences" if their Sunday sermons did not stop criticizing human rights violations and urging dialogue with leftist guerrillas. The menace was taken seriously: El Salvador's last archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was assassinated in 1980 after receiving similar threats. In a grisly reminder...
...Soviet strategy seemed to fall flat. In Washington, President Reagan deftly countered Andropov by challenging the Soviets "to negotiate seriously at Geneva" and vowing that the U.S. "will stay at the negotiating table as long as necessary." NATO defense ministers, meeting last week at the Canadian resort of Château Montebello, near Ottawa, summarily dismissed the Soviet walkout threat and announced that NATO planned unilaterally to scrap 1,400 existing warheads in Western Europe during the next five or six years. The weapons are part of the alliance's stockpile of tactical nuclear arms, which many experts feel...