Word: insularity
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Whenever I enter a room full of journalists or writers, they give me a look as if I had just raised my hand and said, "I'd like to let you know that I'm a child molester." There's that insular attitude. I wish I had never said a thing. I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting...
This much of the story is true: In 1976, an English wine merchant named Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), operating out of a small shop in Paris, is consistently snubbed by the insular and snooty French oenophile establishment. So he sets out to prove that offerings from other countries, which he unsuccessfully stocks, can equal those of the previously unchallenged French vintages. This leads him to California's Napa Valley, where he seeks wines that might fare well in a blind tasting he plans to stage in France. There he finds, among other good wines, a Chardonnay bottled by cranky...
...must do business with. The award has mixed consequences for both men. De Klerk, 57, must worry about the Jan Smuts syndrome. Smuts was the World War II Prime Minister of South Africa who was lionized abroad and discredited at home. Afrikaans- speaking whites are an insular tribe, and they turned out the urbane field marshal in 1948 for not attending to his own people. De Klerk's popularity is lower now than ever before. It has dropped steadily since he triumphed in the nationwide whites-only referendum on negotiations for a new constitution enfranchising blacks last year. A recent...
Disputes have a way of reverberating for a long time among London's insular but closely monitored literary set. The latest - and surely not the last - salvo in the most heated current contretemps of the chattering classes has now come from novelist Ian McEwan. He has found it necessary, once again, to declare that Martin Amis, his friend and a fellow giant of English letters, is "not a racist...
...salary are long past. She paints a picture of crumbling neighborhoods and failing schools, unavailable health care, shrinking pensions, single parents working double shifts. "This has been the case for my entire lifetime," she says, and warns that "we're raising a generation of 'young doubters,'" children who are insular and timid. "They don't try, because they already heard us tell them why they can't succeed...