Word: seemly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wilson makes the shy Alan Cranston seem positively flamboyant. Cranston's greatest vice is jogging too much for a man his age (74); the most colorful thing about him is his hair, which he dyed an orange shade of red five years ago to update his haggard look for a brief run for the presidency. For a while it looked as if Cranston might lose his seat in 1986, but that will take someone a lot duller than challenger Ed Zschau, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who believes in memory chips and the Pacific...
...languages are spoken, that extends from the perfumed hills of the Westside to the barrios of East L.A. and the ghetto of Watts, where state, county and regional authorities overlap one another, voters hardly know who's in charge. Bradley and the business community, his biggest supporter, seem to like it that...
...extensive postwar literature of espionage and double agentry, fact and fiction tend to blur. Was Magnus Pym the name of John le Carre's perfect spy? Or was it Guy Burgess? Pym and Burgess, Donald Maclean and Toby Esterhase -- characters from the shadow world of MI6 and the KGB -- seem equally real, equally fanciful...
...with Harold Adrian Russell ("Kim") Philby, whose exploits as a Soviet mole inside Britain's Secret Intelligence Service seem breathtaking enough to have been crafted by a master of the thriller genre. The son of an eccentric Arabist, Philby entered Communism's orbit while at Cambridge in the 1930s. Carefully disguising those links, he joined Britain's SIS and rose high enough in its ranks to rate consideration as its potential chief. Yet by the time he disappeared in 1963, only to surface in the Soviet Union a few months later, it was painfully clear that Philby all along...
Oddly, Philby's comments on world politics and on his colorful past seem wan and trite. It is almost as if this supermole wanted to demystify his own legend, making double agentry seem as banal as bartending. The impression of ordinariness is reinforced by his chatty letters to Knightley, which are cited in extenso. Philby comes across as a slightly dotty old Brit, complaining about how hard it is to find "bilambees" (an Indian vegetable) in Moscow and fuming about the "preposterous" radio commentaries of "the BBC's own Smarty Cooke, Alistair of that...