Word: deftly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Kriza, as the sly, ribald Bluebeard in the ballet of the same name, was not only deft at comic gestures, but a lively dancer. The entire corps, as a matter of fact, was in excellent form throughout the whole performance...
Died. Norman Douglas, 83, who tried his deft hand at music, diplomacy, linguistics and science (zoology, geology, archeology) before he wrote, and sold in 1917 for a piddling ?75, the novel South Wind, a perennially popular satiric classic that made him famous; of a stroke; in penury in a borrowed villa on the Isle of Capri. The son of a Scottish cotton-mill owner, Douglas first journeyed to Capri in 1888, on the trail of a rare species of blue lizard, fell in love with the island and made it his soul's operating base. In his middle...
...less experienced . . . attribute our deft gifts of maneuver to diabolical cunning, masquerading as stupidity. The more experienced realize that . . . our diplomatic tactics [have] been governed by what ... is really an infinite capacity for adjustment to changing proportions of power...
...movie's handling of child behavior, though too glib and sometimes doubtful, is unusually sound for a Hollywood film, fairly free of obvious tearjerking, and shrewdly balanced with comedy. Deft writing and acting freshen even so ancient a running gag as the one about the married couple forever thwarted from going to bed together. As knowing in audience psychology as in child psychology, Room for One More rises above such lapses as treating an Eagle Scout badge-award ceremony with the solemnity of a coronation, or allowing the struggling, hard-pressed Roses to live in a house that...
...Paris exhibit of unknown Marquet drawings showed that he was not always the serious, hard-working rearguard painter most people thought him. As relaxation from his more ambitious oils, Marquet had strolled the streets of Paris, doing maliciously observant sketches of the people he saw. In a few deft strokes, a blob of black ink or a casual crosshatching, he caught the posture and movement of a speeding cyclist, a barmaid scratching her head, an old fiacre driver waiting for a fare, a bemused, potbellied pedestrian...