Word: enigma
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...other factor predisposed England to warfare that depended on cleverness. The Germans had an elaborate code-writing machine called Enigma...
...ciphers were supposedly uncrackable. But a Polish Jew named Richard Lewinski, who had worked in the Enigma factory before fleeing Germany, succeeded in duplicating the gadget from memory and sold it to the English...
Flinty Intransigence. The result is that Still has become a respected enigma. He is seen as a model of flinty intransigence, and looks it: a gaunt, atrabilious figure of 71 with a cutting eye, he has managed to control the fate of his work more effectively than any other artist of his generation. He still owns nearly all his output, going back over four decades and comprising thousands of paintings, all closely documented and indexed. Still's canvases rarely find their way onto the market. He will not sell them except to the few collectors and fewer museums...
...mystery, neatness not only counts, it is everything. As the genre's undisputed queen of the maze, she laid her tantalizing plots so precisely and dropped her false leads so cunningly that few-if any-readers could guess the identity of the villain. The reader surrenders to an enigma in which the foul act of murder seems less a sin against man or God than a breach of etiquette...
...surface, George F. Will is an enigma, a man of contradictions and paradoxes who doesn't fit into any neat compartments. He is a Washington Post columnist who praises Gerald Ford more often than he damns him; a National Review editor who frequently ridicules Ronald Reagan; a conservative who decided Richard Nixon was guilty of impeachable crimes more than a year before his resignation; and an academic who, at least until recently, called himself a Republican, and who traces the origin of his conservative outlook to his disappointments as a youthful fan of the Chicago Cubs. If there...