Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fortune of some $60 million (which will tide him through the London embassy's estimated excess expenditure of $50,000 a year above the ambassador's $27,500-a-year salary and allowances), but he has always managed to combine the graces of a patrician upbringing with shrewd common sense. Once he ordered his name expunged from the New York Social Register because he considered it "a travesty of democracy . . . with absurd notions as to who is and who isn't socially acceptable." When a Florida businessman tried to drive a hard real-estate bargain by whining...
...LAST HURRAH, by Edwin O'Connor. A lusty, irreverent and affectionate fictional portrait of a shrewd gasbag who became a powerful political boss. The story stays on target so steadily that Boston's ex-Mayor Jim Curley still thinks he was having his picture taken...
...SAILOR, SENSE OF HUMOR & OTHER STORIES, by V. S. Pritchett. Critic Pritchett, who is also one of Britain's top short-story writers, sketching directly from life. The best items in this collection, extremely funny and uncommonly shrewd about people, have the impact of a bitter quarrel overheard...
Club Without Bylaws. Virginia's shrewd, courtly Harry Byrd became governor in 1926. He promptly sponsored a forthright antilynching law (Virginia retains today a poll tax that works not so much against Negroes as against non-Byrd-organized outlanders. who often forget to ante up in time). Byrd also spurned easy, inflationary financing in favor of a pay-as-you-go road plan (tourists in Virginia, who bring in $600 million a year, still drive comfortably along Byrd-planned highways). After Harry Byrd went to the U.S. Senate in 1933, his followers continued to give Virginia good government...
...Iron Curtain last year (TIME, Jan. 9), footloose Author Capote (novels, stories, plays, movies) decided to try his hand at something new, tagged along with the troupe. The reasons why the Soviet Ministry of Culture gave permission for the Porgy tour are obscure, but Capote's own shrewd guess is that the opera's message about people being happy though they have "plenty of nothin'" conforms to the Kremlin notion of the American Negroes as "poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row." With the keen ear of a private eye for the giveaway phrase...