Word: soul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation or lack of sleep. Reading it, you realize how soul-sad lonely you are. And Wallace creates that effect, like Pynchon, while being laugh-out-loud funny...
...named?) Jack is a notoriously unemployable drunkard who in his youth stole prolifically, then fathered a child out of wedlock, then fled Gilead. He hasn't been back in 20 years. "I failed as a lowlife," he cracks. "But not for want of--application." A tender, troubled soul, Jack feels desperately guilty about his misdeeds, but at the same time he finds his family's Christian forgiveness unbearable. Glory and Robert are furious with Jack, but at the same time they ache with love for him. All three of them vibrate uneasily in the close quarters of Robert's time...
Introspection isn't his bag. "I'm a very simple soul," he insists. He's certainly a well-defended one. Francis Elliott spent 18 months researching and observing him as co-author of the biography Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative, yet still finds him elusive. "I've come to think that the word that best describes Cameron's personality is glassy," Elliott e-mails. "Smooth, cold, so flawless and polished you forget it's a barrier - until you try to cross...
...nice a person could never have transformed the nasty party. It required some iron in the soul for Cameron to face down traditionalists who accused him of betraying Conservative values. That metal is well concealed. Peter Sinclair, his Oxford economics professor, says, "We've had rather few Prime Ministers who've been as intellectually able as David," but recalls that his student (who, he says, won "a sparkling first") was "keen not to show up other people." A similar tribute comes from Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford: "He was one of the nicest and ablest pupils I ever...
Much of Cameron's strength derives from self-belief: not the fragile veneer of assurance acquired or affected by most politicians but a deep-down certainty that protects him from dark nights of the soul. "There's no massive thing I've done [where] I lie awake thinking I wish I'd never done that," he says. From a stable, loving family, sent to a school that instills a sense of entitlement in even its dullest pupils, Cameron seems never to have doubted that he was destined for great things. "He came to Oxford equipped with a much more complete...