Word: transformation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Calvi began spinning his web in 1971, shortly after he became director-general of Banco Ambrosiano. An employee of the bank for 24 years, Calvi was determined to transform it into a major international financial institution from a relatively small regional bank with strong religious overtones (until ten years ago, would-be shareholders had to present baptismal certificates to prove their Catholicism). One of his initial steps was to form a Luxembourg holding company, Compendium, which later became Banco Ambrosiano Holding. The advantage of a foreign subsidiary: it is not subject to Italy's banking regulations. Calvi...
Even U.S. prisons were supposed to be part of the New World's promised land. The first American prisons would not merely punish inmates, but transform them from idlers and hooligans into good, industrious citizens. In 1790 a group of Philadelphia Quakers, brimming with revolutionary optimism, began the experiment in a renovated downtown jail. They were bent on "such degrees and modes of punishment . . . as may . . . become the means of restoring our fellow creatures to virtue and happiness." No other country was so seduced for so long by that ambitious charter. The language, ever malleable, conformed to the ideal: when...
Byplay becomes foreplay. They fall into each other's arms and then violently push away. She taunts him with gossip about her former conquests: Shakespeare, Aristophanes, T.S. Eliot, everyone, in fact, whom Miles might hopelessly wish to emulate. He wonders aloud why she will not transform herself more frequently into the shape of that delightful West Indian nurse, simply for the sake of varied stimulation, if she is so confident of her own seductive powers...
...ordinary citizens began to mass outside the shipyard's main gates, decorating them with flowers, ribbons, papal portraits and red-and-white banners. And before the year was out, Solidarity had finally become a reality, a free trade union, 10 million members strong and powerful enough to transform the political life of Poland...
...lock on the '70s sensibility. This, one could feel, was the way the American upper middle class attempted to face the new demands of sexual and racial equality. And this was the way a sympathetic comic artist, reporting from the inside of the analysand wonderland, could transform these demands and dreams into engaging movie narratives. But when Mazursky tries to Say It All about modern life, his voice can turn strident. His valued collaborators, the actors, can lose their charm and become stick figures, animated ideograms. And his characters plunge deep into their obsessions and forget how arrogant their...