Word: hopelessly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with a setting of his early childhood at the idyllic country mansion called Kilnegh in County Cork; this is followed by an extended description of life at Willie's boarding school--a passage that is too long and distracting, and reads, with its contrived nicknames for masters (Mad Mack, Hopeless Gibbon) and standard schoolboy fare, too much like an inserted set-piece; finally there is the massacre which turns Willie's mother to alcohol and then suicide. This leads to an act of revenge that forces him to remain abroad for most of his life, and which drives his first...
...time of her pregnancy by him. She observes that "Destruction casts shadows that are always there," and she herself is "haunted by fragments of disjointed dreams in which [she] was endlessly pursued by [her] parents' weeping"; for Marianne has left her comfortable home in England to come on a hopeless search and then long vigil for Willie. And she proceeds wanted, like Hardy's Tess, from one to the other of Willie Quinton's old acquaintances, repeating the refrain "I am going to have Willie's baby," which resounds like a death knell across rural Ireland...
...interest of science, I will shoot it." Exposes began to play the vaudeville circuit: Magician Harry Houdini showed audiences that the mysteries of spontaneously moving objects were no more than sleight of hand and, sometimes, foot. The Fox sisters, one of them by now a hopeless alcoholic, finally confessed that the strange rapping had been done by manipulating their big toes...
...start of the campaign, King's candidacy seemed hopeless. He had been fond of wearing dashikis and jumpsuits to sessions of the state legislature, and was considered a shoot-from-the-hip radical. Four years ago, he finished third in a six-way mayoral primary. Even in Boston's relatively small (22% of the population) black community, feelings about King were mixed...
...favorite institution is the Church of England; many of her excellent women live through it, in a round of jumble sales, festivals, parish politics and hopeless crushes on clergymen. If Pym's ecclesiastics tend to be a weak, feckless lot, it is no wonder: they are endlessly cosseted by women. One of her most vibrant characters is Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle, actually an affectionate portrait of the author's sister Hilary. This middle-aged lady is crazy about curates, the younger and more threadbare the better. Any veteran of her bounty-rich food, good sherry, hand...