Word: cagey
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...books, it is coyly set in the form of autobiography-but-not-really; its narrator, as usual, is a ventriloquist's dummy named Christopher Isherwood whose surface sometimes seems faintly warm. Characteristically, there is too little fiction for a novel, too little truth for autobiography. Yet in his cagey, canny way, the author has written an engaging work of self-revelation...
Even the secretary of the Fogg flunked this question-not to mention the chairman of Princeton's art department. Other guests scored themselves on sheets of paper, compared their verdicts with the officially announced facts, and quietly crumpled their papers. One expert was too cagey to take the test at all. "I could say." said James Rorimer, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "that I can't see without my glasses." A trifle icily he added: "People shouldn't come in to a dinner party and give offhand opinions about what's genuine and what...
...Elizabethans. Nemesis, in the Hemingway tragedy, is bad luck. "I was going good," says Manuel, the gored bullfighter in The Undefeated, "I didn't have any luck. That was all." "Never fight under me," says Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees. "I'm cagey. But I'm not lucky." Even Santiago, the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, says, "I have no luck any more." Under the brilliant physical surface in Hemingway there was always the metaphysical brooding, the glancing reflections on a destiny his characters keep telling themselves...
...delicacy, devotion and disappointment, few sports come close to the Auerhahn shoot. Only the male of the species may be hunted, and the bird is so cagey that it can be approached only during mating season-when its sharp sense of hearing is momentarily dulled by the ecstasy of its own love call. Bad weather or bad luck can plague the most careful stalker. Heavy winds, for example often drown out the telltale mating call; morning alpine mists make successful camouflage. And when the Auerhahn is not clucking rapturously, it is listening intently for female response; the slightest sigh from...
...Self-Destruction. In Hamlet, worldly-wise Polonius gets everything wrong but is never at a loss for plausible hypotheses or cagey tactics. Lewis Eliot is only half wrong in these novels, but that half blights his personal life. His wife and his best friend take parallel roads to self-destruction...