Word: knacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blue-eyed Neil McElroy encourages people to call him "Mac," has a soap salesman's knack for making new friends, introduces himself to strangers as "McElroy of Procter & Gamble." He enjoys parties, tennis, fishing, poker and bridge, tries to spend weekends with wife Camilla, son Malcolm, 14, daughter Nancy, 21 (another daughter, Barbara, 19, is married), is a working Episcopalian. At the office he is a stickler for accuracy, delegates large chunks of responsibility, expects subordinates to back up suggestions and arguments with facts. To forestall a conflict-of-interest problem, he will sell $56,000 worth of General...
Inner Reality. This, probably the most offbeat novel of the season, and certainly Waugh's strangest, gains much of its quality from Waugh's rare knack of creating character and situation with the flick of a few words of dialogue. His ability to give airy nothings a local habitation and a name is untouched by the delusory subject matter. There is reality amid the hallucinations. Many standard Waugh phobias, e.g., journalists, book reviewers, evangelical clergymen, may be identified. In a prefatory note, the publishers state: "Three years ago Mr. Waugh suffered a brief bout of hallucination closely resembling...
...Diefenbaker won his first case on a fluke, he quickly picked up the knack of winning others on his merits. Of 20 murder cases that he tried, only two clients went to the hangman. "He's a spellbinder before a jury," says an associate. "He would start his defense by working on one member of the jury, pitching to him exclusively. When he had him, he would start on the second and so on until he had the whole jury won." Says Diefenbaker: "I just chat with the jury...
...purely extractive national economy." As the campaign progressed, his audiences became bigger and more demonstrative. Keeping a man-killing schedule of daylight speaking tours and nights of travel by train and airplane, he seemed to live on chicken sandwiches and cat naps grabbed in moving automobiles. He explained his knack for dropping off to sleep easily: "You just clench your back teeth." On his six-week, 20,000-mile campaign tour, he astonished his staff by gaining...
...only the lucky who live. Some men, without being cowards, display an extraordinary knack for survival. Such a one is Gunner Herbert Asch, the fictional Wehrmacht veteran who for six years of World War II managed to escape the enemy's bullets and the stupidity of his own commanders. Asch survived, not as the anvil survives the hammer, but as a nimble, highly intelligent fly eludes the clumsy hand that would kill it. For Asch is a true operator, a hepcat of war who knows every nuance of the dance of death and leaves it to the squares...