Word: thrall
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...year is 1899, and something eerie is happening. Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who has already taken the Continent by storm, now holds London in thrall. Her act is indeed worth catching. For Fevvers, who stands 6 ft. 2 in. tall, also boasts a pair of wings that, when spread, span 6 ft. She does not hurtle; she soars. Attracted by the publicity, an American journalist named Jack Walser thinks he may have found another subject for a series he is planning on "Great Humbugs of the World." He interviews the famed "Cockney Venus" in her dressing room after...
...recent anointment to the apple-pie job of baseball commissioner left most of the country in the dark about him. How did he achieve such a spectacular success? What combination of strength and guile lay behind that almost inscrutable exterior? All his life Ueberroth has been in the thrall of challenges. The Olympics were clearly his greatest. He made speech after speech to his thousands of workers about how together they had to climb a majestic mountain. "I've always hunted for challenges," says Ueberroth dismissively. He is a man who has little patience for self-analysis. Was there anything...
...than could be replaced. But he characterized his dispute with Westmoreland as an honest difference of opinion. Actually, he testified, he regarded estimates of enemy strength as inherently unreliable and unimportant. It was a remarkable aside from the precision-minded man who was often accused of being in the thrall of statistics...
...some reason there has been a tendency to mythologize this campaign, to portray Reagan as an abstract force that has settled at the heart of the country and held it in thrall. Our barefoot boy. Our monarch. Reagan has contributed to this view by being at once highly visible and unreachable, creating a public presence so pleasantly familiar that it dismisses normal scrutiny; people like to have him around. But people vote for facts as well as feelings. There is nothing abstract about the appeal of lower personal taxes, lower inflation, lower interest rates; of greater national pride; of relative...
Every man in the platoon was in thrall to Mommy dearest; at 31, Fred could not resist the pill-popping, unstable Ruth Coe, who was often his "date" at realty open houses. She also accompanied him on frequent hairstyling appointments. "If Kevin hesitated in the middle of a sentence," recalled the receptionist, "Mrs. Coe would fill in the word. They're that close!" Then, one evening, after a quarrel about his lack of accomplishment, Ruth vandalized Coe's car. "Don't let Son upset you," she once told Perham. "He's not worth it." Perham...