Word: shrewd
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...Barger's career tells much about the company: a geologist who arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1937, Barger spent four parched years prospecting the Rub' al Khali, learned to eat roast camel with his fingers and speak fluent Arabic, became Aramco's chief negotiator with the shrewd Saudis...
Reporting on the U.S. of the early 1830s as seen through his shrewd Gallic eyes, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans tended in their attitude toward the arts to "put the real in place of the ideal." That has always been true of the interior of the White House. First occupied in 1800, when the nation was still in its raw infancy, when Washington, D.C., was a muddy village with a few thousand inhabitants, the White House has, through the changing decades, served its practical functions as residence and office for the President. What was neglected was the ideal...
...histrionic level, The Leopard presents two performances sensitively supervised by Visconti. Cardinale, who in the past has tended less to play than to display, is delectably vulgar and amusingly shrewd as the ragazza whose ways are almost as captivating as her means. And Lancaster, within definite limits, is superb. True, his Salina never quite becomes the figure of "leonine aspect, whose fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper." But as the scenes accumulate, the character compiles impressive volume and solidity, and by film's end the grand Sicilian stands in the mind...
...church have risen 50% in the past decade. Seminary enrollment is currently running ahead of clerical retirements and deaths, and many Anglicans believe that the caliber of new priests is higher too. In part this may be due to the incentive provided by the church commissioners, who through shrewd investments in the stock market* have since 1948 doubled the amount of income available for ministerial salaries, which in some cases have risen from $1,400 to $2,800 yearly...
Noses & Newborn Twins. Lloyd's old-fashioned ways cover a shrewd, practical attitude toward risk taking. Lloyd's prospers by conceiving new forms of insurance, accepting risks that no other insurer would dare, and keeping a wet finger in the shifting winds of world business, politics and science. It recently insured the on-time opening of the New York World's Fair next April. In February, Canada's missilemen scrubbed a scheduled launch just before countdown until liability coverage could be placed with Lloyd's - the only in surer that would touch...