Word: thrall
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...world of power plays in which everybody's somebody's victim. Sandy is attracted to Jeffrey's quiet intensity. Jeffrey is beguiled by Dorothy's mystery, her dangerous demands. To keep her family alive, Dorothy must surrender to Frank's depraved games. But even Frank is in the thrall of Ben (Dean Stockwell), an epicene drug dealer, who in turn is subject to the political power of a heavyset enigma in a yellow jacket. On that stroll in the woods, Jeffrey fell down the rabbit hole and found an inverted pyramid of moral monstrosity. "I am seeing something that...
...celled organism" that evolves "into something rather grander--a bird of paradise, for example." Falling in love involves "a kind of inward lurch," as if one "were having a dream about falling off a ledge." Adultery, despite its dazzle and heat, gets polished off as "limited doting, restricted thrall...
...post-Watergate era, power has been fractionated on Capitol Hill. Where a few powerful committee chairmen once held sway, Congress has become a loose federation of 535 little fiefdoms. This has made a lobbyist's job more difficult, but it hardly means that Congress has been ! liberated from the thrall of special interests. Well- intentioned congressional reform has been subverted over the years by the proliferation of lobbyists and the spiraling cost of election campaigns, two trends that go together like a hand and a pocket. The result has often been institutional paralysis. The very fact that Congress...
Women and politics, not to mention men, take a thorough drubbing in The Good Terrorist. The heroine, Alice Mellings, 36, is thick-witted, tubby and held in thrall by her "admiration and wistful love" for Jasper Willis, a loutish layabout who also happens to be a homosexual. Alice's adult life has been spent caring for this creep and setting up a succession of "squats," or communes, where they can live until Jasper wears out his welcome, which seldom takes long. After four years of staying with and sponging off Alice's divorced mother (whose class Jasper winningly calls "bourgeois...
...week the world was held in dreadful thrall by the spectacle of Americans turned into political pawns in a distant land. Only at the weekend did there appear to be the slightest sign of a possible breakthrough. Meeting on Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet decided to free 31 of the 776 Lebanese detainees, most of them Shi'ites, currently held in Atlit prison, south of Haifa. The gesture was quickly dismissed by Shi'ite leaders in Beirut as inadequate, but it could conceivably help ease the impasse...