Word: skillful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Diet and force a new general election. He might resign in favor of Taketora Ogata, a trusted conservative junior ("my Eden"), and watch matters from the sidelines. His enemies, confident that they can at last strike him down, are nonetheless warily respectful of the old man's political skill...
...everything from labor legislation (he was for it) to prohibition (though a teetotaler, he was against it) to female clergy (he was for it). In his sermons he was apt to quote The New Yorker as well as the Bible. He preached quietly, but with an actor's skill, and in a voice so rich and delicate that board chairmen and bored charwomen alike would come back again and again for more...
When the famous jaw of "Piltdown man" was proved by chemical tests to be a skillful fake (TIME. Nov. 30. 1953), some authorities were unwilling to condemn the late Charles Dawson, a respected antiquarian of southern England who claimed to have found it in 1911. The faking was too good, the experts said, for a man without technical skill...
Respect for Dawson's skill has now gone up, and his moral repute has taken a tumble. Curator John Manwaring Baines of Hastings Museum found that five more antiquities that had been lent to the museum by Dawson and later bought from his widow, who sold them in good faith, were no more genuine than Piltdown man. Flint instruments proved to be of modern manufacture, and a "Roman" cast-iron statuette turned out to be a small, recent copy of a full-size statue in Rome. When not busy with antiquities, the industrious Dawson "wrote" a two-volume history...
...nostalgic, satiric, philosophic and clownish by turns, he shows bafflement, bitterness, faithlessness, a saving sense of humor and an even healthier sense of mystery. He can limn a breast or buttock, an evil grin or a sorrowful eye, with one stroke of his pen, but he never stands on skill alone, and even scorns perfection. A devoted artist, he keeps showing by purposeful slips and elisions that art is a matter of illusion. "What's my line?" he seems to ask. and never waits for an answer...