Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What Is a Farm? The Smouha affair, or the Smouhaha, as London wags inevitably called it, arose over the fanciest deal struck in a lifetime of shrewd dealing (cotton, moneylending, land speculating) by one Joseph Smouha, longtime operator in the Persian Gulf, Lancashire and the Levant, and known as the richest British subject in Egypt. This was his acquisition of 700 swampy acres on Alexandria's outskirts. He got Farouk's father, Fuad I, to proclaim it "Smouha City" and, while holding about half as low-tax "farm land" for future speculative profit, turned the other half into...
...associates credit him with an uncanny instinct for avoiding overexposure and repetition. He has been going light on the nightclub circuit in favor of more cross-country tours to college campuses and small-town auditoriums. He feels that direct contact with such audiences revitalizes his performances. As a shrewd showman, he refuses to appear regularly on television because he dislikes both the overexposure of TV and the fact that it can rarely offer him the time to develop a finished show. He also refuses to plug his own hits indiscriminately. Having kicked off the calypso boom in the U.S. three...
...advanced people live in the Middle Ages. The son of a witch doctor who claimed to have eaten human flesh, Boganda became a Roman Catholic priest, was unfrocked after he went to Paris as a Deputy and married his French secretary. A prosperous coffee planter and shrewd politician who likes to spout Latin phrases, he once gained enormous prestige by announcing just before an eclipse that he would perform the miracle of blotting out the sun. His dream is of a "United States of Latin Africa" embracing all of French Equatorial Africa, as well as parts of Portuguese Angola...
When O'Casey is introducing his immutable characters, which is for the first three-quarters of a very long evening, he displays his talent for sketching the Irish at their lovable best-warmhearted, simple but shrewd, full of energy, laughter, stupidity. When he finally comes around to the task of giving us a little action, his patrons are so conditioned to absurdity that anything else is probably impossible...
...Philadelphia, nearly everybody agrees that the Inquirer has a knowing way with a dollar. Owned by the shrewd, multisided Triangle Publications (Seventeen, TV Guide, Morning Telegraph) of the Annenberg family, its morning paper (circ. 604,977) is the nation's fifth largest daily and its Sunday edition (circ. 1,108,209) is Philly's biggest, also ranks fifth in the land. But last week the Inquirer put the finishing touches on a financial deal that seemed entirely out of character: it was paying staffers bonuses to quit...