Central Europe, cleft from the West during the cold war, is the continent's universal joint: a fact that puts the responsibility for surmounting the politics of historical division squarely on the shoulders of a united Germany.
It was rebuilt with international (mainly American) help, and burnt again in the second world war.In 1968, though, it was the Belgians themselves who cleft the book collection during their language wars.
The downturn will now be deeper and longer than anyone imagined". The war against terrorism has left corporate America in a cleft stick.
On the cold summit of Mount Tumbledown, where the last, brutal battle of the war was fought in a maze of rocky clefts and blind corners, faded bits of old poppy wreaths blow around in the squalls.
The reluctant war correspondent arrives with two tonnes of luggage, including canoe and cleft sticks, and is promptly embroiled in the backstabbing, fact-embroidering machinations of the press pack.
He is an American National Guardsman who was called up to take part in the war in Afghanistan, and he has written a novel about a young Afghan girl with a cleft palate and a hopeless life ahead of her, who is operated on by good-hearted American surgeons.
Olja Savičević and her characters' generation grew up "in a depression, in a cleft between two houses", and the murkiness of her brother's death has undertones of neighbourhood vendetta, the legacy of a war that "had a way of making people's ethnicity everybody's business".
Winston Churchill, who would accompany the relief force as a second lieutenant and war correspondent, described the camp as "...a great cup, of which the rim is broken into numerous clefts and jagged points.
Protibial spur with distinct cleft.
