Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...days later, Carter tried to patch up relations with the oil industry. He hastily assembled 15 executives in the Cabinet room for a session that a White House aide said would plot "how we can best manage the projected gasoline shortfall this summer." The President also wanted to know why prices were rising so fast. For two hours, the oilmen gave him their version of the crisis. The gasoline retailers blamed the oil producers for zooming prices at the pumps. Sniped Victor Rasheed, president of the Virginia Retail Dealers Association: "There has been some price gouging, perhaps...
Twenty years and 15 novels later, Muriel Spark is as tricky as ever. At first appearance,her cool, elegant prose and witty characters seem comfortable within the traditional British comedy of manners. But with a twist of plot here and a turn of the psychological screw there, Spark sends her comedies careening off in deadlier directions. Wit becomes malice. Tea and crumpets mask terror and corruption. Ordinary lives turn bizarre and mysterious...
Territorial Rights, the latest of Spark's engaging deceptions, is a suspense story set in Venice and full of corruption and intrigue. Clues, coincidences and characters are linked in the sort of intricate plot that seems to come effortlessly to Spark. Robert, a student of art history and a male prostitute in Paris, ostensibly settles inVenice to view the churches and paintings. But he is really there to pursue Lina, a Bulgarian refugee searching for her father's grave. The plot, and the crowd, thickens: Robert's aging male lover, his father and his father...
...recruited to stand in for him, drawing the evildoer's fire until the sibling and his cohorts can be undone. In a tale of this sort, there is an irreducible minimum of suspense and action, which really cannot be satirized, lest all tension be drained from the plot. There is also a certain essential nobility of character that cannot be bleached out of the double's personality, lest all belief in these improbable doings be lost. The result is that Peter Sellers, in the key double role, must play his part as the substitute king very straight...
...Engelhard, who built a financial empire through his investments in South Africa, touched off a controversy that administrators wanted to die fast. Protests and meetings with both undergraduates and K-School students kept the issue alive, however. When the end finally came, all the issues dovetailed like the plot of a fairytale; rarely in the real world do controversies have a happy ending...