Word: deftly
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...lamp: the song throws off odd refractions of color and veils a 100-watt glow. The melody is sinuous, but the lyrics say something scary just at the end: "God have mercy on the man/ Who doubts what he's sure of." That is Tunnel of Love in two deft lines, an album about love that is not about exaltation or passion but about the doubt and fear, longing and uncertainty that shadow every deep feeling, every tender gesture...
Isozaki's postmodernism was not fueled, like that of many Western architects, by a hankering to reproduce a particular, seductive historical style. The forms and fragments in his work are not cute or ready-made. Instead, he is an antirationalist, a form-follows-intuition designer whose deft play (tricks of perspective, false facades) tends toward the baroque but whose work comes off as anything but fusty. He is drawn to elemental geometries -- cubes, cylinders -- and natural materials, but he seldom leaves them basic or pure. He pulls together polished granite with curved glass with concrete, and makes columns short...
...responding to the growing criticism about air safety and airport delays. "That's just not fair," she protests after calmly reciting a list of recent measures. Always poised, she is at her most confident defending her department's record. The Harvard-trained lawyer methodically prepares her material and is deft at marshaling facts. But she can be wounded by a stray remark. When told that a Democratic political consultant had joked, "At least no one can say she quit while she was ahead," Dole grew silent, wide-eyed and quietly hurt. "She takes her job very seriously," notes Robert Ellsworth...
...diplomatic maneuvers looked a bit flat-footed, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra seemed to execute several deft pirouettes. He announced that three exiled priests could return to Nicaragua and hinted that the Roman Catholic Church's radio station might be reopened within 90 days. Some Central American officials speculated that Ortega was merely trying to embarrass the Reagan Administration; others argued that with Nicaragua's economy a shambles, Ortega was genuinely bent on procuring peace. Whatever the case, on the public relations front, conceded a U.S. official, "the Sandinistas have certainly done much better than we have...
...adventure, Appleby and the Ospreys (Dodd Mead; 185 pages; $15.95), to investigate the murder of a dotty peer struck down in the library of his ancestral country pile. There is not much out of the ordinary in either the premise or the solution, but Innes' plot prestidigitation is as deft as ever, and his celebrated sense of humor is in full flood, whether sketching a social-climbing mother or recounting a literal manifestation of bats in the belfry of a parish church...