Word: clever
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...imaginative without illusions, and creative without religion, loyalty, patriotism, or any of the common ideals. Not that he is incapable of these ideals: on the contrary he has swallowed them all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and the stage manager...
...seems familiar to audiences around here it's probably less because its characters are like people we know than because so many plays recently have used the same sort of situation and devices (plays like Moonchildren and The Wager). What these plays have in common is the use of clever, Tom Stoppard-like dialogue as a facade, covering emotions that are revealed in a dramatic crisis. Paul Ableman is no Tom Stoppard, but his brand of collegiate wit keeps the surface of his play funny and entertaining...
...cinematic scraps is a pretty fair notion for a thriller: how the smooth, ambitious organizer of a small cell of industrial and political informers programs each of the members to kill one another. The members take information from various fields of specialization and pass it along to a clever control, who uses it in turn to blackmail and barter for positions of power. He wants to liquidate them to consolidate his power and go on to bigger plots. His plan is carried out almost according to the letter, with just one hitch, stashed right at the end of the movie...
...ordinary annals of sleuthdom. Even such outstanding detectives as Nero Wolfe, Inspector Maigret and Philo Vance pile up and sift the facts. Holmes notes the evidence with something like X-ray vision and pulverizes it with weary disdain in a sentence or two. His fictional colleagues may be clever; he is clairvoyant...
John Wilmot was one of the most clever Court poets during the reign of Charles II, and in many ways he represents the very nature of the Restoration: he was lewd, selfish, disdainful and he had no sense whatsoever of right and wrong. In that era Hobbes made it fashionable to have a rational disregard for religion, the only binding force for an otherwise criminal aristocracy. Any power Parliament had gained during Cromwell's Commonwealth dissipated with the return of Charles II, for whom Rochester saved some of the most vicious barbs--as in this epitaph...