Word: sparking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FASCINATION WITH POWER--often human and individual, sometimes supernatural, never quite definable--has traditionally emerged from the glowing reaches of Muriel Spark's imagination. Her novels and short stories feature closely-knit enclaves of manipulators and their victims. In The Bachelors, five or six nearly middle-aged men and women linked by their fascination with the supernatural, and hounded by clinging mothers and impossible romances, formed friendships that became occultist liaisons--which led to trials for forgery, coercion, and suggestions of murder...
Strange forces and magnetic personalities often lead to mysterious deaths in Spark's worlds. She does not, however, create repetitively leaden conflicts between the bold and the puny. Power is ephemeral--it is never the sole right of an individual. "It is all demonology and to do with creatures of air." Ronald, sometime occult victor and sometimes victim in The Bachelors, observes, as the wheels of power spin dizzily about his head, whirring and clicking, bobbing back and forth with no point but endless effect...
...Loitering With Intent, Spark's birstling dailogue bounces back and forth, carrying with it the seeds of power. As attention shifts, characters shuffle, hesitate and lose their authority. Fleur Talbot, the narrator of the story, is a novelist, recounting the events and characters that populate her life and her first novel as they unroll side by side in post-war London. Her voice is self-assured, speaking to us from a secure vantage point, anchored thirty years later by reputation and maturity. Fleur is single, 25 years old and extremely, efficiently ambitious. She's secretary to Sir Quentin, founder...
...times as likely to be used against blacks as whites. In February about 10,000 demonstrators, including many from Brixton, marched peacefully in nearby Deptford to protest what they considered deliberately lethargic police investigation of the deaths of two young blacks in a fire. The latest spark appears to have been struck the evening before the rioting, when blacks accused police of failing to respond quickly enough after a black Brixton man was stabbed to death...
...Corporation must not heed Citibank's cries that the $250-million loan it made to the government last fall--which led to Harvard's sale of $50-million-worth of Citibank notes and securities--went to "humanitarian" causes and should spark a reexamination of Harvard's policy. We continue to advocate total divestiture of all investments in banks lending money to the South African government or companies operating with or in South Africa...