Both positions are strong (I'm talking here about the topicality of crosswords).
None of the songs are memorable, and there is something clumsy and dutiful about their topicality.
It was hardly a barn burner, but with a catchy piano hook and a certain topicality about racism -- this was not long before Tawana Brawley -- "The Way It Is" gained significant air play and even made it to No. 1 on Billboard's Top 40.
The filmmaker's movies may not be overtly topical, but topicality is never far from his mind.
There's a topicality, too, about Steven Spielberg's historical drama Lincoln (2012, Fox, 15), although neither the 16th president nor the abolition of slavery is the real heart of the drama.
Verdi's early opera about the mad, despotic ruler of Babylon has unexpected topicality in these bellicose days (Babylon lay near present-day Baghdad).
In making the case for the abiding relevance of its subject, it occasionally strains for topicality, as when a juggler makes jokes about the Bush administration.
The book "fizzes with doubts and anxieties about the way we live now" and has accidental topicality after the recent riots for which it reads as a "form of grim prophecy".
There may be intakes of breath, in audiences here, when Bond says that American intelligence services "will lie down with anybody," and when even the temperate M blurts out, "I don't give a shit about the C.I.A.," but how can we seriously ascribe topicality to a thriller that pays no heed to actual foes, such as Al Qaeda, presumably for fear of denting the market overseas?
Do we know the topicality of a story (is an injured-player story about sports or health?).
