Word: element
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...said that men are shaped by their environment, and no writer could match him in describing the environments that cradled or smothered, polished or abraded, buoyed or drowned his heroes. But in the end, his people are shaped by the past to which they are born. The decisive element in every Marquand novel is character, a quality he seemed to see as halfway between fate and breeding...
...there is nothing fatal or final to point to. In Britain, the Tories still hold the husk of the Establishment and hope in the upcoming elections to make it "Four in a Row." The new element is the familiar Anti-Nuclear Bomb movement of today, but in FitzGibbon's time its pony-tailed and sandaled youth has swollen into the biggest political fact in Britain, led by zealots and exploited by those who know that pacifism cannot help but help the Russians. And when, in a landslide-election win, the anti-Bomb boys and girls take power...
...typical case is that of iodine. No fewer than 21 radioisotopes of this element can be prepared, and the medical profession has found ways to use six of them. Last week Ohio State University's Dr. William G. Myers reported that a seventh, I-125, shows promise as a convenient tracer to follow the metabolic pathways of ordinary iodine. But it has not yet been used in humans. An odd mother-daughter combination is ruthenium-rhodium 106. Long-lived ruthenium 106 gives birth to short-lived rhodium 106, which in turn gives off energetic beta rays. The pair...
...people would think back to Pearl Harbor, they might recall that the surprise blow was struck midst tea-and talks aimed at achieving a common ground of understanding. Such men as Powers and the agency they represent deserve our overwhelming gratitude for undertaking the perilous task of reducing the element of '"surprise." The idiots in this instance are the Pollyannas who, in blind faith, would close their minds to the possible parallel of tea and vodka...
This, of course, is part of the great, continuing debate between democracy and tyranny. Like any reliable historical fiction, Imperial Caesar lacks the element of surprise, but it does move with the fateful tread of a great man's destiny...