Word: thumbnailer
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Beevor is a skillful guide through the complex jockeying for position, sketching thumbnail portraits of the senior officers with novelistic abandon. (Of the senior British commander, the exasperating Sir Bernard Montgomery, he writes, "His self-regard was almost comical.") He is willing to be graphic, though never gratuitously so, in his descriptions of battle. Maybe the most horrific weapon on the battlefield was the white phosphorus the Allies carried. During the bitter fighting for Hill 112, an English soldier tried to slip through barbed wire under machine-gun fire. A round clipped a phosphorus grenade in his pouch and ignited...
...This is particularly apposite in the case of China, a country with not only many possible futures, but (as it were) many pasts. There is a crude but commonly held thumbnail sketch of modern Chinese history that goes something like this: Two centuries ago, European powers tried to open a hermetic society to trade; they failed until the Opium Wars forced the issue; China then entered an era of foreign domination and internal chaos, which ended with the imposition of political stability by the Communist Party in 1949; in 1978, after another round of internal unrest, China chose to modernize...
...years; by the 18th century, the Chinese were producing porcelain for the European market and avidly studying European art and architecture. In particular, says Mitter, the first half of the 20th century - that period when Shanghai was at its peak, but which is routinely dismissed in the thumbnail history - is "really important; the questions about their society that Chinese are asking now are very similar to the ones that they asked in the 1920s and 1930s." (Read "Why China Keeps Picking on Sarkozy...
...news, Obama issues, Obama facts and Obama biography. Google does have a type of categorization in its "related searches" feature, but it's not nearly as prominent as what Bing's. Bing also has a handy video preview feature in which you can hover your cursor over a video thumbnail and see highlights from the video play automatically...
...also has a standing invitation to a lovefest with America's social conservatives. Like opera or scrapple, Palin is something of an acquired taste, a phenomenon loved by some, detested by others, with an uncomprehending vastness in between. But for those who don't get it, here's a thumbnail sketch of her rightward appeal: For the pro-life movement, this cheerful mother of a Down-syndrome baby is a rousing affirmation. For the gun-rights movement, she's a glamorous, moose-hunting shot of adrenaline. She hates on the media, never forgets the troops and is a walking middle...