Word: shopgirl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fogel, the son of an immigrant sign painter and a halfwit shopgirl, is born in London and drifts through childhood and adolescence preoccupied with his special powers. He believes he can become what he observes-objects made of stone, iron, wood, glass. "The god he wanted to reach wasn't interested in words. Only in achieved states. Palpable transformations. He would be known only by those who had gone through them." Fogel's crowning obsession is the diamond. Acquiring some through a friendly burglar, he becomes a fanatical student of facets and crystallography, of refraction angles and cleavage...
...Place de la Bastille to the Hôtel de Ville. Had the Premier, who has been a deputy, mayor of Bordeaux, minister of the Fourth and Fifth Republics and speaker of the National Assembly, now become a liability to his party? Gaullist Deputy Jacques Richard overheard a shopgirl remark, as she paid her taxes, "Ah, if only I could manage things like Chaban." "That," said Richard, "is when I realized how serious the situation...
November 1970: After years of searching, Bokassa-now President of the remote little Central African Republic and the father of eleven children by his present wife-receives word that the South Vietnamese government has found his first family. Martine, a shapely Saigon shopgirl, flies 11,000 miles to Bangui, her father's capital. Though she arrives at 4:30 a.m., a visibly moved Bokassa and thousands of his cheering countrymen are on hand to greet...
Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, the illegitimate son of a Liibeck shopgirl, he was raised by his grandfather to be a fervent blue-collar socialist. In 1933, to escape arrest by the Gestapo, he changed his name to Willy Brandt and fled to Scandinavia. In Norway and Sweden, his doctrinaire socialism was mellowed by experience of the more pragmatic Scandinavian brand...
...Nazis and Socialists spilled over into bloody street battles that erupted all over Germany. In the Baltic seaport of Liibeck, the Nazis met a tough opponent in a husky, square-jawed youth named Herbert Karl Frahm, a member of the Socialist youth club. The son of an unmarried shopgirl whose lover had deserted her before the child's birth, Herbert Karl and his mother lived as boarders in the home of a chauffeur whose own wife had little patience with the child. Perhaps to compensate for his unhappy circumstances, the boy excelled at school, winning a scholarship...