Word: listlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After four years of summit meetings held under the lengthening shadow of potential failure, the ten leaders of the European Community blundered last week into a diplomatic debacle they long had feared. At the end of three days of alternately listless and acrimonious negotiations in Athens, they found themselves unable to announce agreement on a single item of their long agenda. The key obstacle: the threat of bankruptcy for the Community unless there is an increase in member contributions to its common budget ($22.5 billion in 1983) or a scaleback in an expensive ($14.3 billion this year) agricultural subsidy policy...
WHILE MOST OF THE performances are competent, few rise above the level of mediocrity imposed by lackluster dialogue and listless direction; the actors tend to react individually, rather than together as a dynamic company...
...doubt about who held the power in the Dickens' doomed household. The prodigiously energetic writer had been happy with his pretty wife Catherine Hogarth in the early years of their marriage. But he became disenchanted and finally furious with her as she grew fat and listless. A few years after the birth of their tenth child in 1852, he moved out, taking all but the oldest of the children with him, as he had a legal right to do. The scandal caused by his action was compounded when Dickens took the extraordinary step of publishing a statement about...
...Narayama, is a harshly elemental lyric about Japanese mountain folk that could have been made any time in the past three decades. Two survivors of the international film wars won special consolations, Grand Prize for Cinema Creation: France's Robert Bresson for L 'Argent, a lucid, listless parable about how money corrupts, and the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky for Nostalgia, an agonizing stylistic exercise about a Soviet intellectual in Italy. Monty Python's the Meaning of Life won the Special Jury Prize. At the closing-night ceremony, Python Terry Jones thanked the jury members by name and quipped...
Barely a month ago, Robert James Lee (Bob) Hawke, 53, was a fledgling parliamentarian with a mediocre record as his party's spokesman for industrial relations. Last weekend he was elected Prime Minister of Australia, leading to victory a listless, often divided Labor Party that has held power for just three of the past 34 years. Claiming about 74 seats in the 125-seat House of Representatives (an approximate swing of 22), Hawke and his Laborites ended the 7½-year reign of Incumbent Malcolm Fraser and his Liberal/ National Party coalition. Fraser, a three-time winner whose majorities...