Word: briskly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cardboard (something especially evident when a burly Scotland Yard cop hilariously bullies Barker with the prospect of preventing him from teaching his “precious physical training classes” and when the criminal mastermind maniacally blathers like the worst sort of Bond villain). Still, Thomas maintains a brisk pace, and the read is quick and often...
...point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would stoke the War of Middle-earth, plaintively asks, "Don't adventures ever have an end?" For Wallace, Warchus & Co., the answer is: not this one, not yet. Rather than a brisk, there-and-back-again jaunt, they are in the middle of a marathon. "Hopefully," says McKenna, "by the time we finish here, we'll have a very sound blueprint of the show we're going to do in London." They plan a West End opening of LOTR a year from now, then Hamburg or Berlin, perhaps Broadway...
...brisk end of Sydney's business precinct, where offices are full at 7:30, morning or night, and it costs $40 to park for a few hours, Canberra has a small foothold. The Commonwealth's elected and appointed officials work out of a Phillip Street building that quietly echoes the Howard ethos: solid, functional, efficient. What you see on the outside is what you get inside. In the waiting room attached to the Prime Minister's Office, the lighting is subdued; the armchairs and art give no clue to era, fashion, or taste. Staffers speak in murmurs, and occasionally...
...Cold War: A New History (the Penguin Press; 333 pages), John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent American scholar of the period, does indeed manage to make the old global standoff seem, for all its insanities, like a relatively coherent and well-managed struggle. In this brisk, useful primer on the period, he reminds us that containment, the decades-long American policy of confining Soviet ambitions abroad, though a dangerous game, was a highly successful one. "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way it was," he writes...
...after 9/11 led to intelligence breakdowns that continue to haunt the U.S. Though much of State of War covers ground that is broadly familiar, the book is punctuated with a wealth of previously unreported tidbits about covert meetings, aborted CIA operations and Oval Office outbursts. The result is a brisk, if dispiriting, chronicle of how, since 9/11, the "most covert tools of national-security policy have been misused...