Word: sleight
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These pressures combined to produce a summit that broke the logjam on Britain's demands. The compromise that was worked out was a diplomatic sleight of hand that saved face for both British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand, who had taken personal charge of the effort to end the deadlock. Said a French spokesman: "There are no victors or vanquished." While other difficulties still remain, Mitterrand, the host of the summit, who was wrapping up his six-month term as Community president, was confident enough to proclaim: "The way has been cleared...
...colorful circumstances or concocting pithy remarks. But such fabrications, however faithful they may seem to the spirit of a reporter's observations, are violations of the ethics of the craft. Thus, when New Yorker Writer Alastair Reid, 58, admitted last week that he had indulged repeatedly in such sleight of hand, he prompted a well-deserved storm of criticism, and an apology from the prestigious and generally scrupulous New Yorker. Said the magazine's editor, William Shawn: "He made a journalistic mistake by our own rules. It hurt no one, it was meaningless, it was done for literary...
...Deng is singularly adept at accommodating his opponents without ever letting them escape his control. In particular, he has deployed some deft dialectical sleight of hand to dismantle Maoism without entirely discrediting Mao. He can hardly afford to denounce the former leader too vehemently: 50 years ago, after all, Deng was a participant in Mao's epochal Long March, and some 25 years ago he was helping Mao administer brutal punishment to hundreds of thousands of intellectuals. But since he assumed power, Deng has published his belief that "every Chinese knows that without Chairman Mao there would...
Zandonai's failure was primarily due to the lack of a strong individual style. For all its harmonic piquancies and orchestral sleight of hand, the score of Francesca sounds derivative-a touch of Puccini, a sprinkle of Debussy, a pinch of Wagner. Further, it lacks a single memorable melody, the essential ingredient that keeps a relic like Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur on the boards. Its plot, however, is operatic gold. Based on a play by Gabriele d'Annunzio, it recounts an episode from Dante's Inferno. Francesca (Soprano Renata Scotto) is tricked into marrying...
Buyers were quick to catch on to the manufacturing sleight of hand. Chevrolet sales slumped partly because drivers could slide into the seat of a comparable Oldsmobile or Buick for only a few hundred dollars more. Quality also suffered, since individual divisions did not have to take responsibility for the corporate clones. The X-cars have suffered an embarrassing number of recalls and face a Justice Department lawsuit...