Word: direness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they marched against the forces of modernity. In 1930, as they sniffed the first whiff of smog at their writing desks in a university founded on the wealth of a New York railroad baron, the essayists of I'll Take My Stand shared, as Warren put it, a "dire suspicion" "that a great commonwealth has gone wrong." The enemy was industrialism, which they characterized as "an evil dispensation" and "a pizen snake." The issue was an intensely personal matter, almost a family feud...
...with friendly appointments and economic concessions. At some point, he knows, he will have to draw the line. That decisive moment may be hastened if severe consumer shortages develop this winter, as some experts fear. Hamstrung by a $21 billion debt to the West, the Polish economy is in dire straits-and getting worse every...
Politicians and critics venture dire predictions about the long-term damage that could result from the present suspension of democratic processes. But few are prepared to deny that "the Generals," as the regime is called, have already gone a long way toward restoring stability to a country that was on the brink of chaos...
...colleague's door were equally bizarre. Close by the doorway towered the stone walls of the 186-year-old Ecole Normale Superieure, an elite graduate school for the best and the brightest students of France. The agitated man in robe and pajamas banging at the door with his dire tidings was no less prestigious: Louis Althusser, 62, among the diminishing survivors of the country's great postwar intellectual set and an academic star at the school. Althusser is a respected author, critic and interpreter of both Montesquieu and Marx. In fact, he is a devoted Marxist...
Looking sleepy, friendly and Englishman-pale alongside the beach-sunned office workers, Mark Knopfler, centrifugal force of Dire Straits, and bassist John Illsley are wandering the corridors of Warner Bros. Records in New York. They're on holiday from the making of Making Movies, their third album, recorded in a scant few weeks at Nassau's Compass Point studios. Coffee is thrust into their hands; radio stations phone incessantly, demanding over-the-phone interviews...