Word: thrall
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...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...
...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...