Word: roman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have brought grief as well as benefit to mankind: empire and the nation-state. Imperialism, which has been around for millenniums, is based on one people's conquering, ruling, often suppressing others. The nation-state, an arrangement that came into its own in the 16th century as the Holy Roman Empire began to disintegrate, sounded like a good idea at the time: people who spoke one language would band together under one flag within one set of boundaries. But such entities -- sovereign in their aspirations, anxieties and hatreds -- too often went to war against one another, sending fresh waves...
...murky era when a variety of Germanic tribes lived in a land that, according to Tacitus, "either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps." Even then, German tribesmen had a reputation as fearsome fighters, and it was immensely important to the future history of Europe that they annihilated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, leaving the Rhine as the frontier between the Roman and Germanic worlds. But it was the Romans who originally invaded those forests to "pacify" the Germans, as they had pacified Gaul and Britain...
...Think of Clifton Webb at age 40," says Dominick Dunne, speaking of a gentleman bitch in his latest roman a clef, An Inconvenient Woman (Crown; 458 pages; $19.95). And why not? Everyone else in the novel seems to have stepped directly from a '40s feature: plutocrat Jules Mendelson; his socialite wife Pauline; his long-suffering mistress Flo March; and a sexually ambiguous friend, the late Hector Paradiso. Hector's violent death was marked as suicide, but Mendelson knows who shot him and why. The cover-up is reminiscent of an actual Los Angeles scandal; the malicious dialogue and the insider...
Stumping for the White House, John F. Kennedy promised voters he would leave office if his Roman Catholicism ever interfered with his political duties. Last week New York's John Cardinal O'Connor proclaimed that Kennedy was wrong: Catholics should fight, not quit. In a strongly worded twelve-page statement published in the archdiocesan weekly, the Cardinal declared that Catholic officeholders had an obligation to support their church's moral teachings -- especially on abortion. Failure to do so, he said, merited excommunication...
...public outcry when a TV personality is pushed toward unwilling retirement typically resembles a Roman candle on the Fourth of July: the blaze is bright but brief, the heat evanesces, and all that lingers is a fond memory in the mind's eye. That is how it has gone for even the biggest stars, from Red Skelton to Walter Cronkite. NBC doubtless imagined it would be no different when it undertook to freshen the Today show by easing veteran co- anchor Jane Pauley toward the sidelines. But in the eight months since Pauley announced she would resign from the show...