Word: adroit
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Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists...
Over the years Beaton was lucky enough-or adroit enough-to find himself in most of the right places at most of the right times. He was in Hollywood during its heyday in the '30s, and in the '40s he covered all the war fronts for the British propaganda office. In the '50s he astonished the fashion world with his magnificent costumes for My Fair Lady and Gigi, and by the '60s he had fully established himself as a waspish, infallible arbiter elegantiae, the Petronius of Britain's comfortably padded decline...
...current crisis had an almost innocuous beginning. In mid-August, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded (from yet undisclosed evidence) that Soviet combat forces, as distinct from advisers, were in Cuba. At that point, the matter might have been quietly clarified and even settled by Moscow and Washington with some adroit negotiating. But the Administration lost control of the issue when it conveyed the intelligence findings to Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an Idaho Democrat who faces a tough re-election fight next year. Church went public with the matter...
...McCarthy has shown in The Oasis (1949) and The Groves of Academe (1952), she is adroit at parsing intentions and ideologies: "Unlike God, the liberal was limited by ubiety. Nevertheless, why pick on the Shah? If the truth were known ... Reza Pahlavi's enormities had been chosen for this group's attention not just because he had an attractive country with an agreeable winter climate but for a still less pardonable motive: his regime was an easy target. Every good soul was opposed to torture, but it suited the Western soul's book to be able...
...purists this approach is sheer heresy--they remember Wagner's demand that his works be called "music-dramas." But most scoff at that today, and take the music much more seriously than the drama. Sellars does the opposite, and compensates for the loss in musical clarity with wonderfully adroit stagecraft. Sometimes it descends to the level of slapstick pot-shots at Wagner's Nibelungs, Gibichungs, forest-birds and bears, but at least as often it sensibly comments on the eternal production problems of the Ring...