Word: shrewd
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...Deputies refused to be bound by the decision. Indeed, ex-Premier Amintore Fanfani finally captured more than 100 of the 399 Christian Democratic votes available but withdrew after the eleventh ballot because of the combined pressure of the Vatican and his party chiefs. Fanfani was feared because he is shrewd, inventive (he created the "opening to the left" regime that still rules Italy) and unpredictable...
Worried Rich. Of course, many factors influence the ups and downs of money marts, but when a country's currency is in strong demand for no apparent reason, it is often a signal to the shrewd Lebanese experts that someone is buying it up to send back home in order to finance a coup. Example: just before Abdul Karim Kassem took power in Iraq in 1958, the Iraqi dinar's price moved up sharply. The traffic goes the other way too: when the rich in a particular country get worried about impending trouble (for instance, before Nasser started...
...group of Texas Congressmen presented him with a laudatory plaque; incredibly thin-skinned, yet able to brush off some criticism with the comment, "My daddy told me that if you don't want to get shot at, stay oft the firing line." He prides himself on being a shrewd judge of men's strengths and failings; yet he was, at the very least, unperceptive enough not to detect grave flaws in two of his very closest aides, Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins...
...brought the greatest royal acquisitions from Italy to England. Through a vendor, Joseph Smith, who wheedled a post as consul to Venice, the King's additions to the royal collection increased by batches of Canaletto. Horace Walpole scorned Smith as "the merchant of Ven ice," but that shrewd gentleman sold his purchases for some $300,000 to the King on the installment plan-with interest. George Ill's wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg requested a sketch of Florence's Uffizi Gallery from a compatriot named Johann Zoffany. The elegant composite result (see opposite page) displeased the Hanoverian monarchs...
Thanks to Director Wilder, Stupid is professionally shrewd and zippy, and flaunts a kind of vulgar integrity. Not only does everyone talk sex; everyone does something about it. That alone might prove refreshing in a Hollywood farce, except that Wilder isn't celebrating sex as a gloriously human temptation; he is exploiting it as a commodity -and he wears a lascivious grin where his satirical smile ought to be. The result, spelled out in dialogue that sounds like a series of gamy punch lines, is one of the longest traveling-salesman stories ever committed to film. Like all dirty...