Word: politicians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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James, however, never lets character overwhelm crime. Dalgliesh and his Scotland Yard colleagues track the killer through the corridors of Whitehall, the hospital of a fashionable abortionist, a painfully trendy suburban restaurant. Among the suspects: the dead politician's vapid second wife, pregnant with his child even though she has had a lover for years; her con-man brother, who has moved into the politician's room; the victim's conniving mother, who mourns the loss of prewar manners more than the loss of her son. The politician himself is a mystery. Why, Dalgliesh wonders, did he suddenly resign...
Peretz owes his readers an explanation as to why a Machiavellian politician who lives and runs in a non-Jewish district might pretend he was Jewish when he was not. To say that his Machiavellian calculus is "unfathomable" is either to acknowledge that it was not Machiavellian at all, or that the underlying facts are simply wrong...
Cicero is an unlikely hero, Segal says, because for most of his life, he was the quintessential politician. "He was a Lyndon Johnson type. He was very successful, and basically bent with the wind. He was never a moral leader," says the writer. "Cicero was a major figure in contributing to the world of great power, great money and great corruption, but at the end of his life, he fought against this corruption. It was heroic, because he didn't have to do it. He could have just led a rich, quiet and safe life in retirement...
What clashes in the connection of poetry and politics is that on the surface, the two forms of expression seem antipodal not only in tone and structure but in the pictures of mind they convey. The poet is a vague and hazy animal, the politician hunched forward like a cat. What one would devour, the other would toy with in the air, angling the world in his paws so as to know not the world itself but the light-play on the world...
Poems also create their own state of mind, and politics does that as well. Paul Valery defined a poem as a "kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words." The politician produces the political state of mind by means of words. Each does an act of hypnosis by persuading its audience that reality is the world that the poet or politician has constructed for them. In that, the two are equally imaginative. The world they create is an unreality. Yet that world must be grounded in reality, in facts -- the real toads in imaginary...