Word: thrall
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...that caught up with Ronald Reagan last week. He believes too fervently that a smash appearance onstage can obscure past mistakes and hold the political audience in thrall for a few more precious weeks. The press builds up the State of the Union as a sort of political Super Bowl. Public expectations rise far beyond what a President can provide. Reagan gave the audience a lot of his robust, even youthful, charm, but the substance was familiar merchandise hastily repackaged...
...strained symbiosis obtained between singers and songwriters. Both were young and ambitious; both pulled the music directly from their own up-tempo urban experience. But the writer-producers were white, most of them, and in control; the performers were working-class girls, black or white, and in thrall. With six Top Ten singles (including Will You Love Me Tomorrow and Soldier Boy), the Shirelles expected that the "trust fund" of their earnings would be substantial but, as they told Betrock, when they turned 21 they learned that the money was not there. Some groups, like the Crystals with...
...down such matters will find that Fowles, presumably the only one with the answers, has disappeared, leaving the slim trace of a smile between the lines. Mantissa is a jeu d 'esprit with a vengeance, its principal characters, like so many of Fowles' earlier creations, held in thrall by forces they cannot quite explain. Erato and Miles are prisoners of gender. When they squabble, as they do throughout the rest of the novel, they helplessly re-enact timeless wars between the sexes...
...without resorting to trivial games. The transition to reality and perhaps maturity is completed by the unexpected news of the Princess' father's death, and all eight principals soberly vow faith and various types of atonement, as if ceremoniously renouncing the comic-traditional world that has held them in thrall...
Herself, that's who. Herself and a whole generation or two of leftists, mostly intellectuals and mostly New Yorkers, who actually spent some or all of their lives in the thrall of sectarian myth. And maybe, more to the point, a somewhat larger number of"60s types who glorified a bit too strenuously the virtues of Fidel and Ho and Mao Sontag belongs, more or less, in both categories; she was born into the Manhattan neo-Stalinist school of the '30s and '40s (though she was never a supporter) and in the '60s revived her interest in Matters political...