Word: cleverer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kissinger, of course, was attracted to Sullivan for more cerebral reasons. "Henry likes clever diplomats but can't abide stuffy bureaucrats," explains a mutual friend. "Bill Sullivan is a very clever diplomat." After serving in half a dozen embassies from India to Italy, Sullivan was plucked from departmental obscurity in 1962 by another enemy of bureaucrats, W. Averell Harriman, then head of the U.S. delegation to the Laos conference in Geneva. "It took me just a couple of discussions with Sullivan to realize he was not an ordinary man," Harriman recalls. He made Sullivan his deputy, but several senior...
...naturally dwells longer on his successes than his missteps, but even the latter provide moments of fine humor. Having refused to accept Herriot's expert diagnosis that his cow had a broken pelvis, one stubborn dalesman proceeded to apply an ancient cure used by his father ("A very clever man with stock was me dad"). The cow turned out to be suffering only from loose pelvic ligaments, which happened to cure themselves almost at the moment the useless home remedy was applied. For years thereafter-which the author would be well advised to cover in a sequel-the animal...
...this last tentative objection may be reactionary: we are used to ephemeral contemporary novelists (for example, Updike) who find beautiful ways of circumventing and clever ways to hedge. Rhodes's is a new and highly original kind of realism. We need it badly, but it will be hard to accept without more from the same young writer...
...estate when his wife's lover, a hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), arrives. Wyke proposes a shrewd plot: he will help Tindle "steal" the Wyke jewels, in order to defraud the insurance company. But that, we find, is not quite Wyke's real goal. And, a still later clever-and-bold twist tells us what Wyke really wants is not what he really wants. And in that fashion the games...
Another recurrent Collier theme is Not Quite Beating the Game. In Bottle Party, a fool named Frank becomes the owner of two bottles, one containing a clever genie and the other imprisoning the most beautiful girl in the world. Frank uses the genie and enjoys the girl, who is also loving and compliant, but he is disquieted when he notices that whenever the girl emerges from the bottle, she wears a look of heavy-lidded satiation. He is jealous, and the genie, who is very clever indeed, leads him on by observing that there is more room in bottles than...