Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, the liberal use of these expensive lures is nothing new; municipalities are often willing to offer everything but the mayor's office to keep businesses, often quite healthy ones at that, in a given city (or state, as the case may be). This if often a shrewd manuever on the part of government officials. Bargaining away certain financial incentives brings greater returns as long as the following assumption holds true: the business in question will bring (or keep) significant economic activity to the city that the city otherwise would not enjoy...
...Humbert (James Mason), a French professor who has come to New Hampshire to lodge for the summer before starting a lectureship, tours the home of prospective landlord Charlotte Haze (Sue Lyons), he is completely turned off by her blatant, grotesque and clingy personality. But one look at Haze's shrewd, sexy adolescent daughter, Dolores (a.k.a. Lo or Lolita, played by Shelley Winters), sensuously sunbathing on the front lawn, and Humbert is there to stay. The story plays out Humbert's pedophilic passions, and, when Lolita and he go on a cross-country escapade, it becomes an extended commentary...
...Roiphe's shrewd observations have an ugly undercurrent. At one point she suggests that accounts of rape given at the marches may be fabricated or embellished: "The line between fact and fiction is a delicate one when it comes to survivor stories," she writes. "It's impossible to tell how many of these stories are authentic, faithful accounts of what actually happened. They all sound tinny, staged." Her insinuation is a cheap shot, unprovable and callous...
Andrew Motion, a fellow poet and younger colleague of Larkin's at Hull, gets close to his subject, but not too close, in this finely nuanced book. The biographer is as shrewd and sympathetic in sorting out Larkin's surprisingly energetic sex life as in parsing his poems. Larkin's longest attachment (38 years) was with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester University. About halfway through this affair he took up with Maeve Brennan, a library staff member at Hull, and a few years later he added his secretary, Betty Mackereth. The point was to play one woman off against...
...itself. Now Ted Turner is infallible. When it was announced last week that his company would buy Castle Rock Entertainment, an A-list movie-production company, and New Line Cinema, a scrappy little quasi-studio, for more than half a billion dollars, practically no one said it wasn't shrewd. But, in fact, the expert consensus on Turner looks wrong once again...