Word: toning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would consider deploying nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe if NATO went ahead with its plan to install 572 U.S.-made Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in five West European countries beginning in December. Some parts of the Warsaw Pact's final statement were even conciliatory in tone. It noted that "no world problems, including the historical dispute between capitalism and socialism, can be solved by military means." It dusted off old peace proposals calling for a freeze on military spending and urging both sides to pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons...
However moderate the tone of last week's statement may have seemed, the Kremlin has not changed its basic strategy. It continues to build up its arsenal of SS-20s, while hoping that pressure from peace groups in Western Europe will force the alliance to scuttle its deployment plans. Some Western diplomats surmised that the bland language of the final document was a result of pressure from Rumanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu, who, to Moscow's embarrassment, has frequently criticized both the East and the West for the arms buildup. Another explanation was that the Warsaw Pact...
...trial of Claus von Bülow for the attempted killing of his wife Sunny transformed family griefs into a Roman circus, and Journalist William Wright adopts a barker's tone in his recollection of the slack, tedious life of the idle rich. (Sunny rose at 11, rarely left the house except to go shopping, and employed eleven gardeners to manicure eleven acres.) He deftly records the countless lies and petty sins of the accused murderer, starting with the facts that Claus was neither a von nor a Bülow (his father, Svend Borberg, was a convicted...
Wright wittily eviscerates the adolescents and haughty matrons who defended Claus (Character Witness Ann Brown, one of Rhode Island's grandest dames, addressed a lawyer "in a tone surely known to every butler in Newport"). But for all its malicious detail, The Von Bülow Affair never really answers the question that nags at every reader: Did Claus really do it? Wright plainly believes Von Bülow is guilty, and even Defense Attorney John Sheehan labeled the prosecution's case "overwhelming." But the examination of the clues is so clumsily marshaled that the reader is left...
...film sometimes wobbles in tone, and there is a certain strain involved in turning Donald and his criminal opponent into allies against rightist paramilitarists. But like all of Ritchie's best work (Downhill Racer, Semi-Tough), the film is full of shrewd throwaway behavioral observations. Sonny, for example, has a daughter (Kristen Vigard) who is a little compendium of spacy teen-age confusions; one minute she is watching porn tapes, the next she is trying to catch falling snowflakes on her tongue. Michael Leeson, who wrote scripts for the TV series Taxi, uses that show's mixture...