Word: clever
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...liquor. Retailers angrily protest that the resulting paperwork is intolerable. Says Mrs. Maria Hendrickx, half of a husband and wife vegetable-selling team in Brussels: "My husband can buy vegetables in the market, but he can't fill in all those damned forms. He isn't clever enough." Another though unvoiced complaint of many shopkeepers: in Belgium, as in some other European nations, tax evasion is a national sport, and the VAT is difficult, if not impossible to escape...
...last measure of commitment-and even love-that a passionate reader gives to a very few writers: (let's say) Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Twain, Melville, Yeats, Crane and yesbygod Hemingway. Is it Updike's faint tinge of smugness? Is he too much a cherisher of clever conceits? The reasons seem murkier the more they are examined, but they refuse to be examined away. What stirs these grumbles this time is the author's new collection of short stories. The book also stirs, of course, all of the old admiration: Lord, how well the man writes...
Robert McNamara, whose bullet-headed manner made him appear an ideal fact-finder, had a fondness for mathematics. David Halberstam has reported that on one Vietnam trip, an edgy McNamara sat through a dull series of fabricated progress reports by American military advisers, but was exhilarated when one clever officer presented his fabricated progress report with elaborate charts, graphs, and computer statistics. Those were facts...
Opposition Leader Rainer Barzel, by contrast, is not as popular as his party. He is a deft political infighter who impresses many West Germans as being too clever by half. Barzel was busy delivering statistic-laden speeches calculated to convey the impression of an issue-oriented thinker. His major campaign issue will likely be inflation, which is running at 5.45% so far this year. Now Barzel's attack has been immensely strengthened by Schiller. A brilliant economist but always a prickly political bedfellow, Schiller was Brandt's "election locomotive" in 1969. Now he is steaming at the Chancellor...
...early arguments with which Lucifer tries to wheedle power from God seem facile and merely clever, but toward the end he makes us question the justice of a God who, with full foreknowledge, tempts Cain to kill Abel. Played as a pretty-boy smart-ass by the top-billed Hal Holbrook, the Devil resembles a cross between a quick-talking, shifty-eyed lawyer and a slightly hip John Wayne. Holbrook appears appropriately serpentine even as he swaggers with self-esteem, but perhaps he could temper his over-confidence a little, considering he flubbed his lines at least three times...