Word: alec
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What do you do with ski resorts in midsummer? Most owners shut them up and join their friends at the seashore. But Alec Gushing, the imaginative impresario of Squaw Valley, hates to do things the conventional way. Three weeks ago he opened what he billed as "the world's highest nightclub"-at the top end of his wintertime ski lift...
...traditional Toryism as the system of open, gentlemanly election by which he was selected. A hard-driving professional politician up from the ranks (see box), Heath edged out Reginald Maudling in a short, sharp contest that left the Conservatives more united than before-a legacy of outgoing leader Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Sir Alec's own selection by the Tories' "magic circle" in 1963 had caused such acrimony that he was led to institute the ballot by Tory M.P.s...
Scarcely had Sir Alec resigned than the two camps, one for Heath, one for Maudling, began to form. But for opposite reasons, neither camp did much canvassing in the five days preceding the vote in House of Commons Room 14. That, too, aided the gentlemanly outcome...
...press his candidacy too hard for fear of seeming "pushy." They knew him as the Tories' chief front-bench fighter against Prime Minister Harold Wilson's finance bill. Tough, computer-quick, he also loomed as the intellectual innovator behind the scenes, having been assigned by Sir Alec to preside over a rethinking of basic Tory policy. Maudling, by contrast, had been nearly invisible as shadow foreign secretary in the Commons, unable to attack Wilson effectively, since Labor's foreign policy is one with which the Tories largely agree...
...successful in part because it was almost the exact antithesis of James Bond. Alec Leamas is more than a spy. He is aging and tired, skilled but fallible. Le Carré took infinite literary pains to limn him as an ordinary mortal, susceptible to mundane pressures, capable of cynicism about his craft, who in the end elects to rejoin the society that he never quite left...