Word: dullards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sadr's ambition to be the grand ayatollah of Iraq is taken as a given by many observers in Baghdad. But whether the Shi'ite clergy in Iran will allow this remains murky. Some observers figure that Sadr, who has a reputation as a dullard, simply does not have the intellect Qom's religious instructors demand in would-be ayatollahs. In other words, Sadr may flunk out of ayatollah school and never attain the kind of religious authority many believe he hopes to wield in Iraq in future years...
...seven previous books, De Bernières uses history to define his central characters. In 1979, the U.K. was mired in economic gloom, and he maps the bleakness of that time directly onto Chris's personality. A hopeless dullard who watches youth movements sweep the world but pass him by, Chris represents the mediocrity of a time and place in which trash lined the streets and protesting cemetery workers refused to bury the dead. "His psychological state is very like everybody's in 1979 when the country seemed to be going nowhere," says De Bernières. "It didn...
...never apologize" is a dullard's policy. The apology - one of the more creative forms of human insincerity - has a thousand inflections and subtle uses. It may, for example, be employed as a splendid instrument of reversal. Remember when Bill Clinton went through his apologizing phase? After a time, we wanted to plead with him to make up with Monica and resume the behavior for which he was begging forgiveness - anything to shut...