Word: comforting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, I could always retreat to the comfort of the illusory reality, or realistic illusion of My Dinner, which concluded with Shawn riding in a muttering, "I'll never forget my dinner with...
Rendell's most recent work, Talking to Strange Men (Pantheon; 280 pages; $16.95), eerily recalls Lord of the Flies. Her schoolboys and -girls are not washed up on some island but housed in upper-middle-class comfort. Yet mentally they inhabit an unseen world where they play an elaborate game of spy and counterspy, conducted with high solemnity and utter ruthlessness. This emotional tinderbox is ignited when the espionage is discovered by an unstable outsider who believes he has found evidence of treason. Rendell's trademark is to invert the classic adventure story: rather than transmute ordinary men into heroes...
...Like that one, did you?" he asks. Some folks say he's too liberal. Wiggins laughs: "My children and grandchildren are always telling me what a reactionary old bastard I am." He enjoys citing the saying that a newspaper should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." But Wiggins can be a softy too. His reporters remember his weeping when a Christmas caroler from a home for wayward boys put his arms around him. Then there is the Wiggins who laughs until he tears. He passes on the latest story from his friend and sailing partner, Walter -- Cronkite, that...
...suffered its worst setbacks in years. It lost 22 men, including eight members of a single unit, and in November both the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority condemned the organization for its part in the bombing deaths of eleven civilians in Enniskillen. The I.R.A.'s troubles are no comfort, however, to officers like French. Sooner or later, they believe, the I.R.A. will stage a spectacular comeback to restore morale among its hard-line supporters...
...imagery, however, Babbitt has problems selling. With a bobbing and twitching face that folds all over itself, Babbitt seems as comfortable on television as a moose being pelted with buckshot. On the stump he is earnestly plodding and uncharismatic. Nor is his product an easy sell. His austere economic prescriptions are the political equivalent of bran flakes with skim milk: good for what ails the bloated body politic, but not the thing a liberal Iowa Democrat is likely to choose over the buttered and honeyed comfort food that others are promising. If Babbitt advances, it will mark an unlikely triumph...