Word: chessmen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hangers-on happened to be on the payroll. All courts tend to be self-referential and mannered, and that of Alfonso I d'Este was no exception. The duke was considered fairly eccentric. He had a passion for do-it-yourself projects: in his own workshop he made tables, chessmen and elaborate boxes; he created ambitious ceramics as well, and even artillery...
...Oval Office minutes before he was to step onto the sunny lawn, where 3,000 of the old warriors and the new trustees of peace had been summoned. For four days the diagram of the proceedings had been drawn and redrawn, the seven chief figures moved like chessmen on their tiny stage, chairs put in the blueprint, then withdrawn, until finally it was agreed they all would stand to talk, sit to sign, stand again. Clinton was to act as stage manager. He would reach for the hand of Rabin at the crucial moment, turn next to shake the hand...
...picture often has the flashy moves of a chess patzer. Phone books are smashed and chessmen trashed. Josh plays catch in a sepulchral chess club, inhabited by a veritable cuckoo's nest of chess nuts. The movie also distorts the chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great...