Word: owlish
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Vladimir Putin's election as president has produced a new antihero in Russian politics. Gleb Pavlovsky, an owlish political consultant with a taste for casual clothes and an abiding reputation for dirty tricks, is being hailed as a genius by the winners and a cynical villain by the losers. The communists, who claim the March 26 polls were corrupted, say Pavlovsky fixed Putin's first-round win, just as a few months ago aides to Yevgeni Primakov accused Pavlovsky of a devastating smear campaign against their man and his main ally, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. His admirers are equally categorical...
Levin traces at least part of his get-there-now heritage to an old boss, David Lilienthal, one of the prototypical "great men" of the 20th century. A tall, owlish Midwesterner, Lilienthal rose to become an adviser to Presidents from Roosevelt through Carter, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and then head of the Atomic Energy Commission after World War II. In 1955 he started a small firm called Development and Resources Corp. to bring power, water and communications to the developing world. In 1967, bored after just four years as a lawyer, 28-year-old Levin joined...
...trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower. Conrad's prevailing mood is darker; though O'Brian can summon darkness and defeat, he is more arch and owlish. But as Forester did, O'Brian novelizes serially. The precarious lives of two memorable characters, friends and shipmates, thread through his books...
Exactly two decades ago as the knees stiffen, but a gnat's eyeblink in geologic time, a writer for the New Yorker hit on a notion for a Talk of the Town piece, one of those short, graceful, somewhat owlish essays that in those days were told with a royally editorial "we." John McPhee's excellent idea was to collar a geologist friend, visit the rock walls of a recent highway cut not far from Manhattan and relate what the newly naked stone told the geologist...
DIED. VIRGILIO BARCO, 75, Colombian President whose social reforms were undercut by his unrelenting war against cocaine barons; of stomach cancer; in Bogota. A former mayor, the owlish-eyed, professorial Barco stammered his way to the presidential palace in 1986. With neither flair nor fanfare, he hunkered down to combat poverty and drugs until his administration was overrun by vengeful cartels...