Most chapters hinge on an idea or character, beginning with Mr. Hitchens's mother, an emotionally volatile figure who hid her Jewish identity from her family, and his father, a commander in Britain's Royal Navy.

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Rather than carom from character to character, as the series once did, the new episodes focus primarily on a single character, beginning with the ostensibly normal son, and the series' center of gravity, Michael Bluth (played with po-faced conviction by Jason Bateman).

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Jane Eyre was a forceful and resource character who, when beginning life at the wrong end of the gender and class relations of 19th century England, did the best with what she had and prevailed.

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Cooper's character was colorful from the beginning: a drunk conducting a series of affairs with younger men, as well as one with the best friend of her husband, the wealthy Gary Reynolds.

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His character Mathias comes to Aberystwyth in search of a new beginning.

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Beginning in the late 1980s, U.S. defense planners began to rethink the character of a possible conflict with the Soviet Union, the central feature of U.S. force planning for more than four decades.

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Although genomics stocks are crashing, I think we picked the right character in Rothberg, who has been part of the DNA sequencing race from the beginning.

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