Word: conundrum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...realm gathered last week in a paneled committee room of the House of Lords. Ranged around a horseshoe table, the lords listened intently as, one by one, bewigged barristers rose to argue the fine points of one of the oddest cases in British legal history-the sort of legal conundrum that could exist only in a country that still has titles and a nobility. The two opposing claimants in the case sat stone-faced in the chamber, refusing to meet each other: Geoffrey Denis Erskine Russell, 54, a prosperous London theater producer, and John Hugo Trenchard Russell, 25, an accountant...
...United States v. Richard Nixon -the very title of the unprecedented case now before the Supreme Court suggests a legal conundrum, a theoretical exercise for law professors. The U.S. as party to a lawsuit has always been represented by a lawyer subordinate to the President. So how can the President's own man be suing Richard Nixon? That critical question is a vital element of Nixon's defense...
...told Elizabeth about his conundrum before they were married in 1949. Long before the term open marriage was fashionable, the Morrises evidently had one-the roles distributed not by tradition but according to talent. James, Morris admits, was not a strong father figure, at least in part because he had to travel so much doing his books. What he tried to be was a kind of devoted patron, whose love and support the children never questioned. "They have known for sure that I was theirs," he says...
...Conundrum were a conventional novel, it would end in this domestic triumph. But marriage did not extinguish Morris' trouble. Few readers are likely to understand exactly why, but the value and affection that Morris conveys about his family make clear what extraordinary pressure he must have felt to do what he finally did. For when the children were well along into their teens, so that Morris and Elizabeth felt that the change would not harm them, he began massive doses of estrogen and opened medical negotiations that led to surgery...
...tall, weathered, attractive, tweedy-looking Englishwoman, has just started a visit to the U.S. to pro mote her book-full of fear that she will be regarded as a freak. She and Conundrum will no doubt be attacked by wom en's liberationists, because both James and Jan have a romantic view of women's nature ("Her frailty is her strength, her inferiority is her privilege") and both believe that there are few more exalted jobs than raising a family. But freakish, no. It is the book's remarkable value that it manages to place what...