Word: skirmished
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...year: 1927. The place: prerevolutionary China. The situation: chaotic. Bandits and generals, distinguishable in some cases only by their uniforms, are battling for control of the country. Foreign opportunists skirmish for treasure. And China's peasants, as always, work, sweat and starve. Malcolm Bosse's novel re-creates the epoch and peoples it with an indelible cast, including a rising warlord named Chiang Kai-shek and a budding revolutionary called Mao Tse-tung...
Whose Little Boy Are You? is that basement. Here, three souls continue to skirmish in a classic recollection of liberalism carried to the point of tyranny. Perhaps in her reading, Ruth Hale ran across another observation by Oscar Wilde: "Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." This is one of those rare and rueful times...
...real problem is real estate. When the College grew in the '60s, it gobbled up neighborhoods and drove up the price of housing for everyone. There is not enough Cambridge for everyone who wants it. That was the war which the city should have fought. Now we can only skirmish over lots and individual buildings...
...politicians had mentally flipped the pages forward to Election Year 1984. Washington was awash in harsh political rhetoric, ostensibly centered on the substance of the fiscal 1984 budget. In reality, the hectic week of name-calling and intrigue, climaxing in a topsy-turvy nighttime Senate session, was a fierce skirmish in the battle to determine which party can most credibly claim credit, or escape blame, for the state of the U.S. economy. When the smoke cleared, both sides were dug into trenches, steeling for a summer of Government by veto...
Censuses have become part of modern life, whether the counted cared to have their noses tallied or not. But in a rare display of actuarial obstinacy, West Germans last week won a skirmish in a war that attacks the very concept of the national head count...