Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under interrogation, quite a few members of John le Carre's vast and devoted reading public might confess a gnawing secret: the wish that the author would get on with his stories a bit more speedily than he has been doing for the past 15 or so years. Ever since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), in this view, Le Carre has been unduly shifting emphasis from action to atmospherics; his espionage plots remained splendidly inventive, but they arrived splintered into ambiguities worthy of Henry James. Which was fine, maybe, for those who wanted their cold war shenanigans decked...
...already the city of 10 million had begun to stir. Supporters of the students banged pots and pans to wake neighbors and send them into the streets with a mission: stop the trucks and armored personnel carriers heading toward Tiananmen, the vast square that has been the center stage of Chinese politics for more than three centuries. Because troops stationed in Beijing might not comply with orders out of sympathy with the hunger strikers, the forces were drawn from nearby provinces. Many of the soldiers were peasant boys who had spent the previous week in camps outside the city. Forbidden...
More than anything else, this drama of so many endangering their lives for a common good triggered the vast outpouring of solidarity from a people used to tending to their...
...Quartzsite is subject to the same forces that control the vast flocks of migratory birds that traverse the continent twice a year. In winter the town swells to absorb 200,000 people. They are refugees from the frozen North, most of them retirees making their seasonal escape in RVs. Then, usually in April, when the temperature begins to rise and the lure of the North is greater, the huge encampment with its bustling activity rolls away, evaporating like runoff from a desert cloudburst...
...Council has concluded that the rebels need more time to prove their military mettle before the U.S. considers any substantial change in its policy of supporting them. President George Bush argued that it would be "unfair" to stop arming the mujahedin as long as the Soviets are handing over vast quantities of weapons to Kabul...