Word: shrewd
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...hero is packed in salt and carted more than a thousand ceremonious miles to his grave. There are also long, featureless stretches that add up to the reading equivalent of driving across Texas. But McMurtry knows exactly what he is doing in this sentimental epic. He is an uncommonly shrewd judge of book flesh...
Epstein's title, Plausible Prejudices, is a shrewd deflation of the potential objection that he is foisting his ideological prejudices on the unsuspecting reader. He makes no claim to the truth. He allows that as a critic he "can only state his belief persuasively," and impose "opinions by main force of eloquence." For this critical duel, he chooses not eternal verity but rather eloquence at forty paces. This is a wise choice, for Epstein wields a pen like the most powerful handgun in the world, and in the course of the book, blows several heads clean off. Listen...
...trade-offs Murdoch must make for this deal, however, suggest that he has a more ambitious plan in mind. After all, here is a shrewd financier spending a great deal of money and giving up his citizenship for half a dozen stations that will not pay back their purchase price for years to come. Murdoch operates Sky Channel, a satellite station that supplies English- language programming to more than 1.6 million homes in Britain and Europe. He also owns two TV stations in Australia. Once Fox steps up production for its TV outlets, Murdoch in turn could transmit...
...interconnections between his life and art, and his willful propensity to exaggerate and misrepresent, Williams merits the scrutiny of a master biographer, capable of comprehending his personality, capturing his voice and explaining that unquenchable need for self-evocation. Donald Spoto might seem up to the task, based on his shrewd if unadmiring assessment of Alfred Hitchcock in The Dark Side of Genius. But Spoto's The Kindness of Strangers is merely thorough, precise and methodical. Almost perversely, it stops short of risking deep perception of the playwright or his plays: it focuses instead on a tedious hunt for the minutiae...
...roar [of accusation] I now heard, I thought I could distinguish different tones--of the gullible, of those who hated the abstraction I represented, of those who knew some history and would never forgive the foreign powers for their part in it, but also of some who were too shrewd and wise to have been taken in by the charade of the day, and--oh, yes, I could hear them--of those who loved me. They all pronounced the same word...