Word: railways
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There were other signs that life was getting back to less than buoyant normality in Britain. Workers for the National Health Service called a one-day nationwide strike last week. The London underground was crippled as strikers closed down the entire system. And this week railway workers are planning a walkout that could go on for weeks...
...railway worker from the northern Caucasus, Andropov was a telegraph operator and Volga boatman before he joined the Young Communist League. He served as political commissar on the Finnish front during World War II and eventually joined the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, rising rapidly to the rank of ambassador. While Ambassador to Budapest in 1956, he helped supervise the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising. Though not previously a professional secret policeman, Andropov was named top cop of the Soviet Union in 1967. He quickly became known for the efficiency with which he repressed all forms of political, religious...
...surface of other cultures without learning anything important that they can express. They learn fugitive skills-how to avoid being cheated, how to cross borders. They come back in a daze of wonder. But even today's writers who travel are remarkably good: Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Edward Hoagland (African Calliope), Jonathan Raban (Old Glory: An American Voyage) and the splendidly mordant V.S. Naipaul...
...bliss of a youth set free from the narrow confines of hometown and ceremonial life. Theroux has also journeyed on the open road, but on a far more expansive one. Encompassing both adventure and introspection, he has recorded journeys from Victoria Station to Siberia, and back, in The Old Railway Bazaar; and from South Boston to the other up of America in The Patagonian Express. Calm and without the intensity of Kerouac, both books afford homebodies a glimpse of the world away from the crackerjack, automatic world of T.V. sets and interest rates...
Many of its traits are drawn from real places in which De Chirico lived. Volos, the Greek town where he grew up, was bisected by a railway, and the glimpse of a train among the houses-which look so strange in De Chirico's paintings-must have been a fact of his childhood memory. But the richest sources of imagery were Turin, which De Chirico visited briefly as a young man, and Ferrara, where he lived from 1915 to 1918. Turin's towers, including the eccentric 19th century Mole Antonelliana, regularly appear in his paintings. Another favorite site...