Word: protean
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...Conant's lack of total candor, perhaps the natural result of Yankee reticence. Whether he is describing a faculty revolt in the late 1930s (over tenure and promotion) or his disgruntlement with John Foster Dulles 25 years later, Conant tantalizes more than he satisfies. Perhaps, too, in his protean lifetime Conant commissioned and read too many committee reports for the good of his own prose...
...plays no one works. Great drama consists mostly of people fighting, hating, making love (licit and illicit), living in a family, being frightened, being bored, reminiscing about the past, wallowing in self-pity, making jokes, mourning, drinking, talking and dying. Because it contains almost all of these things, the protean stuff of life, The Three Sisters is eternally compelling theater...
...return of his 1928 film, The Circus, may correct the imbalance. Refurbished with a new score and an opening song croaked personally by the 80-year-old director/ composer/ producer/star, the film is incontrovertible proof of Chaplin's protean ability to eliminate absolutely everything outside the confines of the screen. Armed with nothing but cane and bowler, the tramp sets out like Quixote with lance and armor. His enemy is the cruel owner of the big top; his love, the villain's misused stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy...
Lindsay's counterattack was protean. Forced to run independently of both major parties and thus lacking the usual precinct apparatus, he attracted thousands of volunteers who canvassed the neighborhoods. Accused of arrogance, he went on television to admit mistakes. Charged with being soft on crime, he boasted of his efforts to beef up the police department. To overcome the argument that his policies had encouraged anti-Semitism among black radicals, he went, yarmulke on head, to synagogues to plead his case...
...engaging in "alibi sex," faking enjoyment of intercourse with their wives. Some researchers, however, have found a number of men and women who have a definite preference for their own sex but engage in occasional activity with the opposite sex and enjoy it. The description of Julius Caesar's protean sex life probably contained a core of fact: "He was every man's wife and every woman's husband." (Caesar's wife was a different case...