Word: sparking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...provide much of the seed money for U.S. business. By giving out start-up cash to farsighted entrepreneurs, they can open whole new areas of business enterprise. Venture money has fueled the development of the computer industry through investments in Prime Computer, Cray Research, Tandem and other companies, helped spark airline industry diversification with People Express and Air Florida, and bankrolled infant gene-splicing companies like Genentech and Biogen...
...critical juncture. Nearly a year after Poland's striking workers had won an unprecedented set of liberal concessions from Warsaw's Communist bosses, the country was reeling under a deepening economic crisis, and the party was in disarray. Hard-liners were calling for repressive measures that could spark a new wave of labor unrest; radicals demanded sweeping reforms that some feared might send Soviet tanks rolling across the border. What was needed, above all, was a strong, credible leadership and clear policies for dealing with the country's problems...
...Dear Miss Spark, How do you do " wrote Evelyn Waugh to Muriel Spark in 1960, after delighting in three of her early novels...
Today, 13 clever and elegant novels later, the question still stands. Loitering With Intent may be as close to an answer as Spark intends to give. Her heroine, Fleur Talbot, is an English writer not unlike herself starting out in a London bed-sitter three decades ago. She takes a job as secretary to a dotty group calling itself the Autobiographical Association, and quickly progresses from helping the members with grammar to embellishing and inventing the very lives they are recounting...
...this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time...