Word: acumen
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Chance Encounter. In her months in office, Isabel proved to have little more political acumen than a cabaret dancer-which is what she was in 1956, when she had a chance encounter in Panama with Juan Perón, then freshly ousted by a coup after nine turbulent years as Argentina's President. She became his companion in luxurious exile in Madrid, married him in 1961 (she was 30, he was 66) and returned to Argentina with him in 1973. In that year she agreed to run for the vice presidency when he urged her to join...
...these excesses are not the whole volume. Whenever Moers stops schematizing long enough to let her consider able critical acumen focus on specific works, she produces fresh, provocative insights into the workings of particular female imaginations. She suggests that Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley at 18, is a grotesque birth myth subliminally inspired by the traumas its author must have suffered as an unwed teen-age mother. Moers also persuasively argues that the gothic novel has its origins in Radcliffe's desire to find a respectably feminine substitute for the male picaresque tradition. The mysterious creaking castles kept...
Wilson's hallmark in this enterprise was not glowing political vision but sharp political acumen. It made him the winningest P.M. in British history, with four election victories (1964, 1966 and two in 1974) against one defeat (to the Tories' Edward Heath in 1970). Wilson himself conceded: "I am not doctrinaire, I just want to get on with...
...rate his essay for philosophical acumen and historical knowledge, I would have to, in these days of inflated grades, give Mr. Kaplan...
These qualities apparently include a reputation for scholarship, in addition to administrative acumen-in Hume's case, earned in the limited sphere of Ampleforth. There he has headed since 1963 a community of 130 scholastics, as well as a distinguished boarding school. While Heenan and most of the other bishops have been ethnic Irish, Hume is an upper-middle-class Englishman with useful Establishment connections. No bookworm, he is also a fitness buff devoted to jogging and squash...