Word: spiritism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first in the wide eyes of very young children, who see Christmas shining a long way off. Older brothers and sisters are more nonchalant; they can be downright businesslike about it. A camera would be O.K., but how about a snowmobile? As the day approaches, the spirit settles over them, too, like fresh snow on a busy town. Parents come round last, rushing from toy stores to cocktail parties, muttering about the cost of evergreen trees, chilled by the cold glare of Christmas bills to come. By Christmas Eve, though, everybody is a willing conspirator...
...been quietly telling the Soviets for months that their intervention in Afghanistan is contrary to the spirit of detente and could jeopardize the passage of SALT II. Why are the Soviets ignoring these warnings? To some extent, they are trying to reinforce a faltering regime. But Western experts believe that the buildup may also be Moscow's deliberate reaction to the increase of American naval and air power in the region around Iran: an oblique Soviet warning of the dangers of superpower confrontation...
...exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches. In the eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities, becomes simultaneously prominent and invisible. It can no longer speak as it once spoke. It is asked to become not an object of contemplation, but a spectacle...
...Bible come alive during his sermons is by gesturing, mimicking and acting out roles with the skill of a Marcel Marceau. But he finds it "appalling and tragic" that present-day idiom itself sometimes becomes the Gospel, as when "sensitivity training is mistaken for the work of the Holy Spirit." Davies' rich and mostly middle-aged congregation regard him as a star performer and a provocative mind. For his part, he likes to quote Karl Earth, who once described preaching as "an attempt to give God's answers to the questions people raise." Most of those answers...
...Smiley, onetime head of the Circus-the British Secret Service. But détente is now the order of the day, and the Circus is anxious to bury both the victim and his story. Ordinarily, the ultimate company man might agree. But behind homicide Smiley detects the ruthless spirit of Karla, his longtime adversary in Moscow. Publicly accepting the injunction of superiors, Smiley decides to do a little freelance investigation. On the scent from London to Germany he encounters a brilliant cast of characters from previous enterprises: Connie, the sapphic Soviet expert whom the Circus has dubbed Mother Russia; Oliver...