Word: levant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over the past year we've been painfully reminded that the clash of cultures can be horrific. Hindus and Muslims slaughtering one another on the subcontinent. Jews and Palestinians locked in a death grip on the Levant. Extremist Muslims declaring jihad on America and destroying cherished symbols of that country's might. The hackneyed metaphor, deployed in countless books about the sport, is that football is war. But now that we have again seen the very real violence and despair of battle, we have to affirm that no, football is not war. Rather, it is a game of uncommon, life...
Underlying all these laments is a deep resentment that the Arab world is not the geopolitical player it feels entitled to be. The wound is aggravated by a historical memory of grandeur, of Islam's expansion from Arabia in the 7th century to the conquest of the Levant, northern Africa and much of Europe, culminating in a final rebuff at the gates of Vienna 10 centuries later. The question many Arabs ask the U.S. and the West in general, says Professor Jean Leca of the Institute of Political Science in Paris, is, "Why are you leaning so heavily...
...defend my way of life, such as it is. In "Memories of West Street and Lepke," Robert Lowell lamented, "I was so out of things," to indicate he was praising the condition. Unhappily, one of the things he was out of was his mind. In a movie, Oscar Levant told Joan Crawford, "Don't blame me, lady. I didn't make the world. I barely live on it." Somerset Maugham dignified the dreaming-out-the-window business. "A state of reverie," he said, "does not avoid reality; it accedes to reality." I like that--accedes to reality...
...loser had to be blissfully out of things; he walked around in a sort of self-assured daze. "Don't blame me, Lady," said the extravagantly out-of-it Oscar Levant in a movie of the 1940s. "I didn't make the world. I barely live...