Word: deviousness
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...seven-league boots are needed for this panoramic drama of conquests and civil wars that is even more a chronicle of power than it is of passion. The characters are uniformly worldlings, plotters, palter-ers, betrayers; even Antony is destroyed by lust, not love; and Cleopatra is as devious as she is passionate. Antony and Cleopatra is really less the sequel of Caesar and Cleopatra than of Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar. And in this checkered struggle for domination, it is not wisdom that triumphs in the end (Caesar lies bleeding in the Capitol), nor idealism (Brutus is dead...
...American home as disclosures reveal graft and corruption over a broad front in our public service. Those charged with its stewardship seem either apathetic, indifferent, or in seeming condonation . . . Despite failures in leadership, [the people] have it in their power ... to reject the socialist policies covertly and by devious means being forced upon us, to stamp out Communist influence which has played so ill-famed a part in the past misdirection of our public administration . . . Our country will then reassume that spiritual and moral leadership recently lost in a quagmire of political ineptitude and economic incompetence...
...Cinemactor John Payne had only to tighten his jaw muscles menacingly as the Government agent in The Name Is Bellingham, a routine thriller about dope smugglers. But Bellingham was noteworthy for imaginative camerawork, some nice atmosphere touches, and the repeated scene-stealing of minor Actor Guy Thomajon as a devious Chinese businessman...
...considerate. The first two qualities are indispensable in a boxing commissioner; probably the other three are a handicap." Smith also had a warning for Christenberry: "This veteran hotelman will find the fight mob noisier than convention drunks, less manageable than a weekend football crowd, and accomplished in more devious dodges than an absconding deadbeat...
...best novelist writing in the U.S. today? By many a gauge-including the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature-the answer is William Faulkner. Yet Mississippi Novelist Faulkner can claim more roots than rooters in the U.S. One reason: his explosive Southern fables are sometimes hooked to devious verbal fuses that leave the average reader weary or wondering. When he wants to, Faulkner can also be as direct as a bolt of summer lightning. Requiem for a Nun is a tantalizing blend of both Faulkners. It rates a middle pass on a fictional report card starred with such finer achievements...