Word: knot
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Judging by initial reports from the collapsed Biafran pocket, the sword of genocide was a lesser threat than the strangling knot of slow starvation. Some Biafrans, according to relief workers, had not eaten for eight days before the capitulation. Afterward, they fled into the bush, where there was nothing to chew on but butterflies. Even so, Gowon allowed no aid without approval from Lagos. "Nigeria will do this itself," he said firmly...
Even after the legerdemain was uncovered, the Israeli government continued to insist to all questioners that the speedy, 45-knot boats would be used to service and defend Mediterranean oil rigs. No one took that insistence particularly seriously. "Using these boats to look for oil is like using a Ferrari to haul potatoes," said a French radio commentator...
...ghetto life, the violence of officialdom overreacting to protest. Still, although Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers were gunned down by calculating killers, it is plausible to argue that the Kennedy brothers were assassinated by romantics gone awry. Many strands of the romanticism were tied together in an ugly knot in the Sharon Tate murder: victims who exemplified an affluent hedonism; alleged murderers from a mystic hippie cult. The cult of violence can be kin to romanticism, as was shown by the 19th century-bred anarchists, action poets of revolution who assassinated several European heads of state as well...
...preoccupations are more exotic. There is, of course, a doomed agent who is the pawn of both groups. The days of John le Carré's simple, cigarette-smoking depressive are over, however. Our man is just down from the Alps, where he lived and worked with a knot of flagellant priests. He makes it to the end, snatching prisoners from concentration camps, but he has bad pains on the 8th, 17th and 26th of each month, the very days when his ecclesiastical friends used to get out the penitential thongs. To tell how he compensates for these twinges...
Herbert Butterfield's chestnut is quoted twice in May's writing. Behind most international conflicts, Butterfield wrote, is "a terrible human predicament ... a terrible knot almost beyond the ingenuity of man to untie. The trouble with option diplomacy is that it makes no Gordian attempt to explain how policy could have been handled differently. "You put everyone in their place," says a critic, "and see how their options were limited to a, b, and c, and see that the war was tragic but inevitable. You can never make any criticism of American foreign policy this way." Without some analysis...