Word: idylic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first round of SALT negotiations ended in 1972. At that time, a treaty was signed on limitation of defensive missile systems (ABM'S), but an interim agreement on the deployment of offensive nuclear arms extends only to 1977. Unless some significant breakthrough can be made soon, the idyl of American-Soviet détente may be lost in the nightmarish shuffle of an accelerated arms race. Well aware that peripheral agreements on scientific collaboration and cultural exchange cannot compensate for failure to achieve this central goal, Kissinger went into the talks with a variety of specific suggestions for more...
...death of his wife Martha in 1782, when Jefferson was only 39, he attempted or actually engaged in liaisons with several women, all of whom, as Brodie suggestively phrases it, were "in some sense forbidden." Appropriately, it was in Paris that Widower Thomas Jefferson, 42, enjoyed his flashiest illicit idyl. As a trade negotiator for George Washington, and later Benjamin Franklin's successor as Minister to France, the lanky Virginian fell in love with Maria Cosway, a capricious Englishwoman married to an obnoxious painter and court toady in London...
...forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden." Indeed, a wonderful, innocent foolishness makes them all irresistible: Wallace Chesney, Rodney Spelvin, Blizzard the butler, and the Wrecking Crew (four retired businessmen whose progress over the course resembles "one of those great race migrations of the Middle Ages"). As befits an idyl, the weather is routinely gorgeous ("butterflies loafed languidly, birds panted in the shady recesses of the trees"), and the sun shines gently...
Eight of the 14 stories in The Life to Come are the survivors of these purges. They deal with such things as the seduction of a provincial couple by two sailors, a brief homosexual idyl between a middle-aged businessman and a milkman, and an East-meets-West shipboard disaster involving a half-caste and a British officer that ends in murder and suicide. Forster being Forster, these goings on are handled better than anyone could hope...
...hidden struggle with a Jewish mother who called him "mein goldener Sigi" till the day she died? As Stone presents him, the young Freud is just another nice, bright Jewish boy, "my son the doctor," and his long and lust-tormented engagement to Martha Bernays is a Victorian idyl of sweet reason and unspattered upholstery...