However, his next big movie project looks like being a period blockbuster set during the Great Siege in Malta in 1565.

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One other report from old London is Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year, " a fictional, though chillingly persuasive, account of the metropolis under siege from the Great Plague in 1665.

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Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

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