Word: thrall
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...which his lawyers will plead insanity, Hinckley, alone in a Maryland stockade cell, now has only himself to hurt; twice he has attempted suicide. Agca, after a boyhood of rural Turkish poverty, attended two universities and eventually joined a gang of young fascist thugs in Istanbul. In their thrall he became a practiced assassin two years before his descent on Rome. Agca's motive was nominally political ("A protest against imperialism," he claimed) but had only the hermetic coherence of the demented. Said the Italian prosecutor of Agca, who is now serving a life sentence in a provincial prison...
...quite different men are in thrall to it in this tragicomic drama and bonded to each other in something resembling a love-hate relationship. Sir (Paul Rogers), who is called only that, is the last of a dying breed of British actor-managers who tour the provinces paying flawed but fervent fealty to Shakespeare. The time is 1942 in bomb-blasted England, and the war has depleted Sir's resources to an extremely tatty troupe: "I'm reduced to old men, cripples and Nancy-boys. Herr Hitler has made it very difficult for Shakespearean companies...
...rattling of Yale's skull and bone does not settle such lingering questions a what killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and whether they were warm blooded or cold. Yet even the most trivia news from the dinosaur world seems to hold everybody in thrall. Adds Yale Pale ontologist John Ostrom: ''It's good busines for the museum and for Yale...
...successful novels have spawned a curious mass-market samizdat that differs sharply from the writings of dissidents. The newest underground hit is At the Last Frontier, a trashy historical novel by Valentin Pikul about Grigori Rasputin, the sexy, self-styled holy man who held the Russian imperial family in thrall. Originally published in the magazine Our Contemporary, which has a circulation of 300,000, the novel caused a sensation as much for its scenes of debauchery as for its virulent antiSemitism. Unfavorable reviews, which criticized the book for its non-Marxist attitudes and hostile treatment of Jews, merely piqued readers...
...resolution, no escapes other than the temporary ones offered by a nightly dose of beer drinking and western fantasy. That mechanical animal is a peculiarly apt metaphor for their way of life: it endlessly repeats itself until, like all mechanized fantasies, it must madden anyone caught in its thrall. Nor can the contraption be broken - any more than most people can be broken of the habits, routines and saving dreams of their cramped lives...