Word: feudality
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Romantic Past. What he found was "less like a small town than a large lifeboat," 17 sq. mi. of moor, mountain and rock supporting 138 people, where a purely feudal society had precariously survived the advent of the welfare state. Utterly interlaced through confinement and bloodlines, the islanders were leading lives somehow larger than life, gossiping about each other ("When Donald Garvard's got a bucket in him, he can be a pest of hell"), struggling to make a living from the land and the edges of the sea, engulfed in a romantic sense of the past that curls...
...countess jaunted about in her sole remaining Horch-Pullman, her feudal subjects tried to gladden her heart by tugging their forelocks and putting on displays of their simple country pastimes, such as munching sausages, guzzling beer and blowing flugelhorns. To no avail. The countess subliminally yearned for some wunder-myth of a man who would kiss the castle back to life-with money-so that she could re-enter it in grand style and give way to those mad, scandalous fantasies that constantly invaded her mind, such as gorging on imported strawberries...
...landscape of New York State Democratic politics is like a long-contested battlefield, littered with the bones of fallen warriors, marked with monuments to victorious but transient knights, occupied in places by warring if ostensibly fraternal tribes. Leading Democrats themselves have described the factions of the state party as "feudal baronies," cannibalistic and almost nonexistent as an organized force. One leader on the party's left says simply: "It's a legal fiction." The very real cast of characters includes organization conservatives and liberals, anti-organization insurgents and reformers, some in and some outside the organization entirely...
...film is far from whole. Occasionally, it moves too slowly. Despite its determined timelessness, it suffers from inescapable time lag. The feudal state of the Army has the aspect of ancient history; bombing in World War II was like bombing in no other war before or since. When the novel was published in 1961, its nonviolent stance was courageous and almost lonely. But antiwar films have become faddish: lately, and Catch-22 runs the risk, philosophically, of falling into line behind...
...Henry III ordered his clergy to forgo dicing and chess playing "on pain of durance vile," but he lost so often to his barons at those very games that he was unable to come through with all the money he had pledged for the completion of Westminster Abbey. In feudal times, incorrigible gamblers had their hands whacked off. Henry VIII, who diced for the chapel bells of old St. Paul's-and lost-decreed the less painful punishment of fines in the Unlawful Games...