Word: sleight
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Accidental Justice. Two characters are among the best grotesques in Greene's entire waxworks. Conder is the archetype of the author's army of squalid journalists -a wretch so practiced at sleazy sleight-of-mind that, although he is a bachelor, he tells everyone that he has a wife and six sickly children. The other is the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, an old jungle hand stiff with integrity and old wounds and hated by his underlings at Scotland Yard. He is a magnificent Greene hero who pursues criminals with stolid skill, shutting away the unhappy knowledge that his quarries...
...more questions. Last week the New York Herald Tribune (see THE PRESS) got its eager hands on a copy of the Agriculture Department's secret report on Billie Sol's cotton manipulations. Dated Oct. 27, 1961, the 140-page document clearly warned that Estes was a sleight-of-hand wheeler-dealer. Yet, three weeks after the report was submitted, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman confirmed Estes' appointment to the National Cotton Advisory Committee, and the Pecos Ponzi was not arrested until last March. Items in the report...
Continuing his comparisons, he asserted that "what counts in the end is quality . . . what has made Harvard magnificent is not sleight-of-hand . . . but action, convictions. This is true also of the country." He added wryly that if "this were World War III, we would not be here today, we would be working on the war. Some people think this is what we should be doing now; I think them wrong...
Late in the book, Mayer outlines the purpose that took him to "about a thousand classrooms in 150 schools." "One speaks of the 'community" and 'the school.' Well, here they are, the pair of them, stripped of the verbiage, the sociological generalization, the psychological sleight-of-hand." But verbiage, enchanted with its own cleverness, chokes Mayer's book, and sociological and psychological observations--some of them rather disputable, to say the least--make up 90 percent by weight of his attempt to get down to bedrock...
Adept as he is at sleight-of-hand tales, Aymé is even better at psychological feet-of-clay stories. The title piece, The Proverb, is about a boy who has been brought up to worship his father but also fears and dislikes him. One day the father insists on writing a school essay for his son. The teacher openly ridicules the effort as a piece of rhetorical bombast, gives the boy the lowest mark in the class. On tenterhooks, the proud father asks his son the grade. Tempted to deflate the stuffy old humbug, the boy lies instead...