Word: adroit
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...bewildering rush toward chaos, Camus uses an onstage narrator who streamlines the transition between scenes (some take only eight seconds). The play roils with the deluded intrigues of nihilists, whom Camus makes strongly reminiscent of modern Marxists. Perhaps the play's chief quality is Camus' adroit emphasis of Nikolay Stavrogin (ably played by Pierre Vaneck), the book's most memorably monstrous character. An empty-souled aristocrat, Stavrogin longs to be a sort of Nietzschean superman. He instigates a band of young revolutionaries to murder, rapes his landlady's little daughter, finally commits suicide. In the hands...
...France's well-to-do, traditionally among the world's most adroit tax evaders, there would be sharply increased income taxes and a new method of assessment according to "external signs of wealth." Regardless of what a taxpayer may declare, the government will add $1,200 to his taxable income if he has a maid, about $1,300 if he has a small car less than five years old, another $1,200 for each racehorse he owns. And if a man is unwary enough to possess more than six such external signs of wealth, the assessors will automatically...
...very real. Lowe's strength depends more on what he knows about people and customs in Jamaica, whom and which he treats softly and without awe in a swift telling. Heliczer's piece proves that irreverence and irrelevance sometime mean the same thing, and is in his usual adroit good humor...
...characteristic of Berlin that while the rest of the world fretted about its continued existence, West Berliners were agitated by an old-fashioned election campaign. "I have come here to experience the coolness and confidence of Berliners," said Konrad Adenauer, and the old Chancellor's adroit compliment expressed a fact...
Hardest hit of all were the Communists, who lost more than 2,000,000 of the 5,500,000 votes they got in 1956. Their defeat was furthered by adroit gerrymandering and the coalitions that non-Communist parties formed against strong Communist candidates. Party Boss Maurice Thorez squeaked back into the Assembly, but his wife, Jeanette Vermeersch, was beaten by a Gaullist in one of Paris' "reddest" districts; so, too, was tubby Jacques Duclos, the party's No. 2 man and parliamentary leader. Of the 150 seats won in 1956, the Communists held on to only ten. This...