Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Your combination of dreary conceit and vulnerability...[has caused you to] become the victim of your own self-importance, which hides your inner problems...
...occasion. Even Abraham Lincoln in ushering in the modern national Thanksgiving holiday could not rise above what a latter-day President might call "the banality mode." Just weeks before he composed the soaring sentences of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln began his 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation with this hackneyed conceit: "The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies...
...this simply a literary conceit, the wishful thinking of someone who has chosen to write in a world that no longer seems to require his labor? With enormous skill and formal grace, Vargas Llosa weaves this question through the mystery surrounding the fate of Saul Zuratas, the former comrade who may have gone backward in time, toward prehistory, to achieve an authority and integrity lost to contemporary writers. Unfortunately, the narrator cannot imagine how Saul could have adapted to such a role: "The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder...
...wonder there is fear and anger in Moscow, particularly among Gorbachevites. They believe no Kremlin leader can afford to give up Soviet power, not to mention Soviet territory. Many American officials share this concern, although they must be careful about saying so. In a conceit of diplomatic formalism that until recently seemed quaint and futile, the U.S. Government has never recognized the legality of the Baltic annexation. Support for human and civil rights is, or is certainly supposed to be, a constant of American foreign policy...
...fathered a son. (That union ended in divorce in 1987; Rushdie is now married to the American author Marianne Wiggins.) His first novel, Grimus (1974), was a critical and commercial flop, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit: that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction, and sold roughly half a million copies worldwide...