Word: worked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the campaign, the L.D.P. repeatedly demonstrated just how out of touch it had become. One L.D.P. legislator suggested that the consumption tax would be less painful if it were an even 4% instead of 3%. Another party member said farmers were only intelligent enough to do manual work. Credit for the greatest blunder, however, went to Agriculture Minister Hisao Horinouchi, who said, "It is wrong for women to come to the forefront of politics." Pausing just long enough to take one foot out of his mouth and insert the other, Horinouchi then attacked Doi, the popular Socialist leader. "British...
...Socialists must consolidate their power, the L.D.P. must work double time to recapture the loyalty of its straying core supporters. The most immediate concern is to find a replacement for Uno. As the search began last week, assertive Young Turks were working to put forward one of their own. But the Old Guard resisted, still bound by tradition, faction loyalty and a determination not to relinquish power. In a seeming capitulation to the young, however, the party agreed at week's end to leave the selection of a new leader to a party vote, rather than the back-room politicking...
...NICE WORK by David Lodge; Viking; 277 pages...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
Bright as its comedy is, Nice Work takes place within a sort of psychological smog spread by England's economy. All the characters, whether they know it or not, are indirect victims of Thatcherism -- Robyn because of the cuts in public spending that have ravaged her university's budget; Vic because of Rummidge's desperate rust-belt competition, which causes his firm to be taken over and him to get the sack; even Robyn's lover Charles because of the post-Big Bang financial speculations that lure him from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily...