Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have no doubt that Stalin was behind the plot. Kirov had turned the Leningrad party organization into a good, active group. He was very popular, so a blow aimed at him would hurt the party and the people. That's probably why he was marked for sacrifice: his death provided a pretext for shaking up the country, alarming the people so that they would accept the terror and let Stalin get rid of the undesirables and "enemies of the people...
Though routinely maligned as a decade of swinish greed, the 1980s also produced a kinder, gentler brand of storytelling, one that might be described as "eco-feminist" fiction. The central plot of this evolving subgenre has become reasonably clear. Women, relying on intuition and one another, mobilize to save the planet, or their immediate neighborhoods, from the ravages -- war, pollution, racism, etc. -- wrought by white males. This reformation of human nature usually entails the adoption of older, often Native American, ways. Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), an immense novel disguised as an anthropological treatise, contains nearly...
...were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often don't mean quite what they say; listeners must find clues in their equally...
...swore that the whole town did it. Moreover, politics never obscures the melodrama, a thoroughly satisfying tale of robberies, rapes and other cruelties ferociously avenged. If Lope de Vega cannot rival his contemporary Shakespeare for depth and subtlety of character, he is surely the Bard's equal for rumbustious plot. (And vastly his superior for productivity: whereas Shakespeare wrote 37 or so plays -- authorship of some is disputed -- Lope de Vega is credited with about 1,800, of which 470 survive. For years, he turned them out at a rate of almost one a week...
...class and background. But the focus gradually shifts inward, to a deepening psychological exploration of a writer of anonymous suicide threats, and reveals how much a successful person may depend on the reaction of others to provide a missing sense of self-worth. At the center of Hill's plot is an outdoor-extravaganza staging of a medieval "mystery" play -- a cunning hint from Hill that his work, like its Middle Ages namesake, is more concerned with moral and metaphysical conundrums than with clues to some mundane crime. The final scenes, set aptly in a Gothic cathedral, convincingly merge...