Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Communist Party's key posts. By this time, though, Mao had a new threat to contend with: the ambition of Defense Minister Lin Biao, then his designated successor. The impatient Lin laid plans to oust Mao via the euphemistically named "571 Engineering Project," but his coup plot was discovered, and Lin died when the plane in which he escaped from Beijing crashed in Mongolia. After Lin's death, that most deft of diplomats, Zhou Enlai, reduced the army's role in political affairs...
...initially falls on British intelligence; the notebooks have fetched up in London, intended for a seedy and temporarily missing publisher named Bartholomew Scott Blair, known familiarly as Barley. The first priority is to find him. The second is to grill him until he admits his involvement in a duplicitous plot. Failing that, the third imperative is to enlist Barley as a spy and send him off to discover more about his mysterious Soviet informant...
...page, just how this improbable hero will perform his role, not only for the nervous intelligence officers monitoring his every move but for the readers as well. With scarcely an intimation of sex, no violence and not a side arm visible, Le Carre has again managed to construct a plot of commanding suspense. Never before has he so successfully merged his narrative and contemplative gifts. The Russia House is both afire and thought provoking, a thriller that demands a second reading as a treatise on our times...
...confrontation between the people of the People's Republic of China and the government created a surreal deadlock -- chaotic yet tranquil, jubilant but darkly ominous. Using lampposts and bicycle racks, bands set up barricades on the avenues leading into the heart of the city. Word spread of a military plot to deploy forces via the Beijing subway system, but the plan went awry when transit workers decided to back the striking students and shut down the power supply. "The people will win!" many exclaimed. Still, the presentiment of danger always lurked, and several dozen people reportedly were injured in clashes...
...done. See how he cues the change of a Zeppelin's course by the shadow scampering across a cocktail glass; watch a motif of cigarette lighters carry complicity from one character to another. Like a fine old haunted castle, his film has secret staircases of suspense, revolving panels of plot...