Word: tangents
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...perfectly manipulated anarchy of Decline and Fall, at once playful and lethal, was peopled with a rout of sinister caricatures tagged with unforgettable names (Waugh is probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later...
...showed a burst of energy last week. The President grappled with the problem of the nation's debilitated military strength. The State Department moved on a new tangent into the mess of the Middle East. In collaboration with Britain and France, U.S. policymakers outsmarted Russia at Trieste. Meanwhile, some private citizens seized upon and wielded a propaganda weapon which might be as sharply effective as anything so far contrived in official quarters...
...kept the conversation in whispers for fear of waking Count Tolstoy, who was asleep in the next room. "He's like this all the time," Turgenev explained. "He has come from his battery at Sevastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gypsies, and cards every night; then he sleeps like the dead until two o'clock...
...each speaker having been chosen in advance to represent all views. Some members leave the chamber, but the majority remain, paying careful attention to each speaker, applauding after every speech. Herbert Morrison, the unpopular Lord President of the Council, sums up the government views, and launching off on a tangent, is almost caught up by opposition speakers, but is saved by a ruling from the speaker. As dinnertime approaches, a recess is declared and the members quickly empty the chamber...
Perhaps the only man who could have stopped Gandhi was brilliant, unstable Jawaharlal Nehru, but he went off on a small and dizzy tangent to his native Kashmir, where the local maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, had arrested a popular leader, the sheik Mohamed Abdullah. Sir Hari had Nehru arrested. In protest, thousands of Bombay mill workers and Calcutta transport workers went on strike. Markets closed in many cities, and in Madura five Indians were killed in riots...