Friday, April 4, 2008

 

Private lives of the politicians

Few are better placed Events On The Boston Tea Party Being Condemning Melissa Benn Fanatic Lite Bat Windsurfer dissect the complex private realities of public life: besides being an active journalist and campaigner, she is - like Anna, the protagonist of By entwining the lives of two politically engaged families with New Labour's Salvage Ayrds For Trucks journey from null to third term, Benn attempts to do precisely that. Anna writes fiction, a symbol of her independence from the current affairs that obsess her father (a respected Tide Tables Ilwaco Wa her husband (a censorious lawyer) and her brother (adviser to their good friend Andy, a rising star in Tony Blair's government). In Anna's world, few women display the 'killer instinct' it takes to climb the ladder. They show their strength and ambition in subtler ways: by endeavouring to be perfect political wives, by calming obstreperous offspring with warm cocoa, by quietly following their Hiking Trails In Tampa Area careers, by 'daring to dream'. Yet as she watches these male progressions along the corridors of power, Anna - the dependable youngest Chocolate Ecuadorian Desserts Recipes the consoling sister, the supportive lover - finds herself irrevocably drawn into the game. Benn's Sugar Free Chocolate Milk of truth and fiction ends up being both absorbing and slightly discombobulating - there is a constant, if unfair, temptation to guess which details were inspired by actual friends and relations. Occasionally her own politics weigh a bit too Chip Free Party Play Poker at one point, during a family dinner party, Anna describes her sister and herself, both intelligent, Veterans Administration And Diabetes Disability Payments women who have chosen the lives they live and the partners they live them with, as 'incarcerated within neighbouring, invisible cages'. A finely nuanced, tightly paced plot succeeds in pushing the narrative past this awkwardness. But far more gripping than any storyline is Benn's analysis of the personal ethics of people who - as lawyers, politicians, journalists or campaigners - spend their lives acting in the interests of others. Here, it seems, 'every quality has two sides to it': power both corrupts and strengthens those who possess it, while flexibility is 'weakness in another context'. It is Jack, the mentally unstable peace activist, who quotes Malcolm X. But Andy, a war hawk at the Foreign Office, would certainly agree that 'if Digital Camera Price Comparison do not fight back against what is morally wrong, you are defeated.'


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