Word: scene
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have many more clues to his elusive personality. "Dan is a man of many moods, a complicated man, hard to figure," says one who has worked closely with him. Rather, who lives with his wife Jean in an East Side Manhattan co-op, avoids the city's social scene. A workaholic who usually gets by on four hours' sleep a night, he spends his spare hours reading, watching sports on TV and fly- fishing in the Catskills during summer vacations...
...novel opens on a scene of riotous confusion: a midsummer night's ball at Oxford University, where a circle of friends who had met at college some 30 years earlier assemble to dance and drink until dawn. If this setting reminds anyone of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, so much the better, for many of the events in The Book and the Brotherhood make sense chiefly as manifestations of Renaissance romance: frantic and aimless wanderings, repeated instances of women falling suddenly, inexplicably in love with inappropriate...
Daylight finally comes, "sending away the enchanted forest and all the magic of the night and revealing a scene, more resembling a battlefield, of trampled grass, empty bottles, broken glasses, upturned chairs, errant garments, and every sort of unattractive human debris." The revelers emerge the worse for wear. Gerard Hernshaw, the acknowledged leader of this elite band, has learned by phone that his ill father has died overnight. Gerard's oldest and closest friends, Jenkin Riderhood and Duncan Cambus, are drunk and disoriented. Although Duncan seldom needs a reason for such a condition, in the aftermath of this midsummer night...
...Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinnis sketched a scene of Richard Nixon backstage at the Mike Douglas Show in 1967. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said to Roger Ailes, the program's producer. Ailes, then 28, shot back, "Television is not a gimmick." The following year, Ailes was hired to help create the "new" Nixon. In 1984 he helped prepare Ronald Reagan for his second debate with Walter Mondale, giving him the effective quip "I'm not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth...
...scene is a composite of dozens of war movies, one of those celluloid images that have become part of the collective mythology. In the foxhole, the baby-faced private is writing a last letter home; the hillbilly soldier is whistling a ballad; the taciturn corporal is just staring wide-eyed into the darkness. Finally, the battle-hardened sergeant speaks, as he lights his last Lucky. "The waiting," he says. "The damn waiting. That's what kills...