Word: winstone
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...techniques of government self-perpetuation are different. Our leaders don't torture U.S. citizens, although they explicitly support torture of innocent citizens in many other countries. There isn't enough domestic spying to threaten freedom of thought, although there is enough to warrant concern. But just like Winston, we have been convinced we love a Big Brother, a vague compendium of patriotism and a particular ethical model of selfishness and greed. We believe we have won a victory, just as Winston does...
...narrative, Nineteen Eighty-Four is simple to the point of banality. Complexities of plot and psychology are, as George Orwell understood, inimical to the cautionary tale. He deliberately cast his main characters--Winston Smith and his lover Julia, the doomed spiritual and sexual revolutionaries opposing the Stalinesque exactions of Oceania--as archetypes of the ordinary. They are a modern Everyman and Everywoman pitilessly propelled forward into a future that seemed all too possible in 1949, when the novel was published. The recent passing of Orwell's prophetic date has not rendered their lives or their fates much less plausible...
...large cast of characters are happily categorized. Chronicler Evelyn Waugh offers seedlings of his farces: "Alastair . . . at some stage in the evening lost my waistcoat. Audrey made declarations of love to me, and Richard to Elizabeth and I to Olivia. I do not think Black Torry seduced anyone." When Winston Churchill's son is operated on for a benign tumor, Waugh decides, "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove...
...fact that the Viet Nam War was on makes a better excuse. As Winston Churchill once remarked, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Nowadays public figures are confronted with the problem of telling the truth or lying in a way that never faced Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln. Before congressional committees or television interviewers they face cameras, instant answers are demanded, and the pictorial proof of what is said goes into the files to haunt them. In the Westmoreland trial, McNamara was a reluctant witness; for 13 years previously...
...professional life was lived in a shadow-the years before 1974, when he came to the U.S. Now, thanks to Theater Critic and Photographer Nina Alovert, who left the Soviet Union three years later, the dancer's Soviet career has been recaptured in Baryshnikov in Russia (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 212 pages...