Word: deft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fighter-bomber to become South Viet Nam's Premier, Northern-born Nguyen Cao Ky, 36, has shown a remarkable adaptability to the art of Asian politics. His handling of the Buddhist "struggle" crisis last spring showed expert timing. His Cabinet-level downgrading of ambitious "Southerners" has been deft and sometimes subtle. His trip to Australia and New Zealand, despite demonstrations against him, generally created a surprisingly good impression. Unlike such predecessors as Big Minh and Nguyen Khanh, the flamboyant, purple-scarfed aviator has been remarkably low key in his power plays. Last week Ky's cool tactics canceled...
Blueprints of the Mind. Passion stamps the paper that the artists have sketched on. Most of the works in Sachs's collection are small. A ghostly group of apostles in bistre (a soft soot brown) watch Christ ascend off the paper in the deft dreaminess of the quattrocento hand of Andrea Mantegna. Sachs loved the graphics of Edgar Degas (he owned 21), and one of the best is the 12-in. by 9-in. brush drawing A Young Woman in Street Costume. Despite its smallness, the purity of the girl's soft profile gives it the monumentality...
...17th century England, lucky lordlings dined with Apostle spoons given to them as baptismal gifts. Forks were a dandy's innovation from Italy, and young men returning from the Grand Tour in Shakespeare's day with tined implements in their pockets were thought effeminate by their deft-fingered fathers. When spoons did become common tableware, they had elongated bowls, less suitable for chopping food than balancing tiny reservoirs of soup. Still, as talismans of gentle birth, Apostle spoons were an exquisite beginning to a surfeit of flatware, which, by 1911, yielded services of 138 individual pieces per place...
Blaze & Blink. Throughout his diaries, Nicolson gives deft descriptions of the people he met. George Bernard Shaw had "eyes as simple and unmalicious as those of an animal. He talks with a faintly effeminate voice and a soft brogue." Henry Ford's eyes "blaze and blink with faith and his large mouth twists sensitively into all variations of approval, obstinacy, pity and contempt...
...AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Bloodletting in the groves of academe. Two faculty couples (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal) cut each other up with words, words and more words in a deft screen version of Edward Albee's play...