Word: fortresses
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Once the nations of the world were fortresses lying snugly behind their three-mile limits, a tradition established 250 years ago, when three miles was the span of a cannon's shot. In the modern world of atoms, rockets, and planes swifter than sound, the wall of the fortress is invisible. The wall is electronic-an outthrust barrier of radars, direction-seeking radios and - aiming instruments. For both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it has become vital to spot and plot the ever-shifting shadows and strengths of the adversary's invisible frontier...
...Scotland, a third witch cackles at NBC's color cameras as TV prop men bring Birnam Wood-root, leaf and branch-to Dunsinane. Along the brooding battlements of Yugoslavia's 12th century Lovrijenac fortress, the ghost of Hamlet's father spurs his son's revenge; deep in Russia, at Tashkent, the jealous Moor strangles the blameless Desdemona. A marble shard's throw from the Parthenon of Sophocles and Euripides, a Greek Shylock pleads, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" -while halfway round the world, black-jeaned Australian troupers tour the outback by bus, with a crown...
...Luis Conte Aguero, whose Cuban TV rating was once up to Paar, fled to U.S. exile because, he said, Castro is now a "prisoner of pro-Communists." Inmates in Havana's filthy Principe Prison rioted twice, setting fire to bedding, and relatives of political prisoners in La Cabana Fortress learned that 30 Castro gunslingers, in a predawn raid, had ordered the prisoners stripped naked, then had jabbed them with bayonets and beaten them with clubs and rifles. Castro's bag of political prisoners: 6,000, or three times the peak number under Dictator Fulgencio Batista...
...region was the last Moorish stronghold in Catalonia. Don Ramon Bereguer IV, count of Barcelona, drove out the last Moors in 1149, immediately founded Poblet as a memorial and an example to the fierce mountaineers of the region. Within the next half century, Poblet became a geographical and spiritual fortress of the combined houses of Barcelona and Aragon, and the resting place of their heroes. A century later, Poblet was a focal point of Catalonia's losing war with Castile. Philip II, Hapsburg heir to the entire peninsula, built El Escorial, near Madrid, partly to overshadow the relatively provincial...
There is a feudal clank to the title of Cameron Hawley's latest novel, and for a moment the startled bookshop browser may wonder whether this chronicler of corporate Lancelots has abandoned the executive suite for the ducal fortress. He has done no such thing, of course. The Lords are not border chiefs but a matrimonial amalgam-Lincoln and Maggie Lord, that is. Lincoln is an organization mandible-a tanned, nobly hewn jaw suspended six feet from the floor and usually worth $50,000 a year because it inspires respect and belief when it flaps, strikes fear when...