Word: london
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Patrick and Jenny Standish have just moved into a modern apartment complex south of the Thames in London (faithful Amis readers will recall the courtship of these two as recorded 29 years ago in Take a Girl Like You). Patrick has stopped being a Latin teacher and now works as an editor at a publishing house. After nearly eight years of marriage, he is proving no match for the temptations of swinging London in the '60s. His difficulties with girls involve an inability to resist them. A new neighbor, Tim Valentine, confesses to another sort of problem: an initial enthusiasm...
Ironically, it was in London that Gorbachev's new thinking achieved its greatest success of the week. Despite serious disagreements over policy during their fifth get-together, Margaret Thatcher and Gorbachev still seemed devoted to their mutual admiration society. Their talks, cooed the Iron Lady, were "very deep, very wide ranging and very friendly." Grinning from ear to ear, Gorbachev enthused that their "mutual understanding is increasing." So much so that Queen Elizabeth even accepted an invitation to visit the U.S.S.R., a historic royal acknowledgment of the distance between Gorbachev and the Bolsheviks who murdered her Romanov cousins...
Moscow's about-face has mesmerized Western Europe, convincing many that there is no longer anything to fear from the Kremlin. A poll in the Times of London last week asked which nation "wishes to extend its power over other countries." The U.S.S.R. was named by 35% and the U.S. by 33%, compared with 70% and 31% respectively in a 1981 poll...
...uncontrolled radioactivity beneath the sea. Along with its reactors, the Mike-class sub was equipped to carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Soviet military spokesmen refused to say whether any such weapons were aboard, but Moscow acted quickly to try to dispel international concerns. Only hours after returning home from London, Mikhail Gorbachev sent reassuring messages to President Bush, British Prime Minister Thatcher and Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The power plant on the stricken sub had been shut down before the vessel sank, declared Gorbachev, who added, "The possibility of a nuclear explosion and radioactive pollution of the environment...
...fact the quality of theater in Moscow is very high. Playwriting, if at times too grandiosely spiritual, at least concerns itself with bigger issues than middle-class marriage, the preoccupation of the commercial stage in the West. Acting is certainly of the caliber of Broadway or London. So is stage design, if a bit too dependent on imaginative metaphor rather than money. True, productions tend to look a lot alike, regardless of content: perhaps as a reaction against the easy intimacy of TV's close-ups, almost every company seems infatuated with mounting shows in gloomy near darkness...