Word: hairbreadth
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...always blowing up on them, the spirit of the CIA being immortal), he disguises himself as one of the robots. This bit becomes especially hilarious when his owner (the admirable Diane Keaton) returns him to the factory in order to have a new and more pleasing head installed. Other hairbreadth escapes employ a recalcitrant flying-belt of the sort first used by James Bond, a wildly inflatable rubber suit and a 200-year-old Volkswagen that starts on the first...
...lover, Count Anton Chiluvsky. As played by Christopher Gable, the count is a vaudevillain complete with waxed mustache and leer. Tchaikovsky, fleeing from scandal, marries the nymphomaniacal Nina Ivanovna (Glenda Jackson). The outcome is nearly homicidal. (One night, wrote the tormented composer, "I was within a hairbreadth of succumbing to that blind, unreasoning, diseased loathing that ends in murder.") Tchaikovsky suffers a series of breakdowns. Nina ends her life in a sanitarium, hopelessly insane...
...Brothers Cohn-Bendit see it, the explosion of 1968-with its barricades, its bloody street battles, its crippling general strike-came within a hairbreadth of toppling Charles de Gaulle. "From the 27th to the 30th of May," they insist, "nobody had any power in France. The government was breaking up, De Gaulle and Pompidou were isolated. The police, intimidated by the size of the strike and exhausted by two weeks of fighting in the streets, were incapable of maintaining public order. The army was out of sight; conscripts could not have been used for a cause in which...
...said Richard Nixon to his party workers during the campaign. So he said again when he appeared before his followers to accept and savor his victory. Now he could forget the defeats, both the hairbreadth miss of 1960 and the humiliating rebuff of 1962. Now he could put behind him the fear that maybe he was, after all, a born loser. Now he could relish the fruits of unremitting labor for his party, of countless fund-raising dinners and victory banquets and formula speeches in remote towns. Now he could demonstrate to the nation-and perhaps to himself- just what...
Miller brought an admirable determination to his job. He could have retired two years ago, when he developed serious heart trouble. But he felt that his work was not done. "I want to move theological education one hairbreadth closer to reality," he told a friend...