They called it the Independent, a name with enduring relevance but also one with a 1986 time and place.
Her recollection of reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and the novels of Jane Austen at the tender age of 12 was a testament to the enduring relevance of literary fiction in an increasingly complex world.
Among the most assiduous are Churchill's own grandchildren; two of them produced books this year that make a renewed case for their grandfather's enduring relevance as an inspirational leader.
Such themes include: an acceptance of the state as the key actor in international politics, the centrality of notions of Westphalian sovereignty, a belief in the enduring relevance and legitimacy of armed force as a guarantor of security, and the proposition that the status quo in international affairs should only be changed peacefully.
Seeing it voiced by all these different contemporary characters reinforces an idea of its enduring relevance, with its barbed words somehow embedded in our shared cultural consciousness.
With prose that takes the English language and infuses it with inflections and a history that is uniquely Igbo, discernibly Nigerian and unmistakably African, Achebe's is a realism that ensures the enduring relevance of his fiction.
Thus the original Magna Carta, 3,500 words in Latin on a calfskin parchment, came into being, its enduring relevance confirmed in the many legal cases in which it is cited today.
The novelist is not only modernizing "The Stranger" but demonstrating its enduring relevance, which has made it an influential text for everybody from George W. Bush, who reportedly read the book in 2006, to the Cure, whose 1979 song "Killing an Arab" provides a concise summary of Camus's novel ("I'm alive/I'm dead/I'm the stranger").
The enduring relevance of Sherman McCoy is impressive, since Wall Street has endured three separate financial cataclysms (the 1987 stock market collapse, the dot.com meltdown and the 2008 debacle) since Wolfe described mid-1980s Manhattan.
One reason "Norma" attains the heights it does -- beyond the enduring relevance of its story about a male partner seeking to run off with a younger woman -- is that it has such a huge, complex, difficult title role.
