Word: deftly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fullmer began to show a bewildering set of new tactics: in business as a Pier Six battler, he had turned Fancy Dan. Instead of ducking his head and plowing in, Fullmer danced tantalizingly beyond the reach of Basilio's deadly left hook. When Basilio swung, Fullmer countered with deft precision. When Basilio crowded him into a corner, Fullmer calmly retreated into a cocoon of arms and shoulders, then emerged to give better than he got. When Basilio clinched, Fullmer wrestled him about as he pleased and tossed in an occasional elbow for old time's sake...
...this glossy French import, the gloomy patriarch of the dynasty (banks, refineries, mines, newspapers) is white-thatched Jean Gabin, a cold-eyed, cunning old autocrat. When men or industries get out of line, Papa Jean straightens everything out with a deft and ruthless hand. He arranges a wedding between an innocent man and his own ward when she gets pregnant by a Gabin employee. He bribes a high government official on behalf of a military relative. With high handed dispatch, he breaks up an affair between his luxury-loving cousin and a fifth-rate actress. Only when he gambles with...
...status symbol in a haystack ("French bread means somebody for dinner"). He makes nurses and vice presidents and suburbanites speak with tape-recorded fidelity and occupational rightness. And his multiple flashbacks rarely loom up like detour signs. Unfortunately, mannerisms do not make the man, and Novelist Birmingham's deft social observations lack the probing roots of Marquand's social experience...
...verse-its deft rendering into English is typical of Latinist Arrowsmith's translation-is. of course, sheer nonsense. The Satyricon is as impure and guileful as anything in literature, and Petronius was mocking Roman bluenoses when he pretended to deny it. But the great gaiety of the work, and the sharpness with which Petronius satirizes esthetes, pedants, bad poets, the nouveau riche and the rapacious poor, lift this gutter odyssey well above the merely pornographic. The fragment that remains of the original huge manuscript is a mixture of prose, poetry and puns, fustian rhetoric and sweaty argot...
Bernard Shaw's "three-ring circus," as H. L. Mencken called Man and Superman, "with Ibsen doing running high jumps; Schopenhauer playing the Calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats," runs a paltry three hours and fifteen minutes in its deft and buoyant revival by the Group 20 Players. In order to make this enormous masterwork fit such a brief compass, the usual expedient is to cut the dream scene in hell, a glorious ideological quartet for voices, specifically designed by the author as a detachable interlude. The reigning powers at Group 20 have decided to leave...