Word: sleight
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...novels of Henry de Montherlant are characterized by a strange air of scatterbrained earnestness. One of the wittiest of modern French writers, he gets his effects, like an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist, by looking in the wrong direction, delivering little sermons about this and that, suddenly popping out with his tricks already worked. Because of this stealthy way of sneaking up on a story, his characters sometimes seem less like human beings than like rabbits pulled out of a hat, blinking uncomfortably at their sudden appearance...
...index of the true state of Germany's trade troubles. Faced with the cost of providing Germany with a million fully-equipped troops, faced with the expense of a grandiose public-works scheme, shrewd conservative Dr. Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister of Economics, has long been doing sleight of hand with Germany's foreign trade. With gold in the Reichsbank dwindling toward zero, Germany, since the rise of raw-material prices in 1935, has had to export finished goods at uneconomical prices in order to get currency to buy abroad such raw materials-copper...
...accomplished painter who had studied under Jacques Louis David in Paris, but remained at ease with tough woodsmen and trappers. In 1808 he married a pretty, well-born English girl, soon after failed at a variety of business ventures in New York City, Louisville, Henderson, Ky. He could do sleight-of-hand tricks, was a dead shot and a good fighter, claimed Daniel Boone as his friend. Wandering down the Mississippi after his Kentucky failures, he painted portraits, taught, was at the lowest point of discouragement when the cultivated Pirrie family befriended him, provided his career with its turning point...
...clearing and eventually attracting 1,000 or so black heathens. Sending word of his imminence by their signal drums, the Negroes called him "White Song Man," dubbed Bishop Moore "Biscuit" or "Wangi Bischoff" (Yankee bishop). For the trombone they could think of no descriptive word. A practiced sleight-of-hand artist who claims he once could do with one hand a flag trick which Magician Howard Thurston needed two to perform, Song Man Rodeheaver performed legerdemain for the Africans, taking care not to let them think that magic had anything to do with...
...strength from two sources--the farmers and the inflationists. It should, at least, be blocked in the Senate, although the possible machinations of a wearisome filibuster by a farmer-inflation bloc presents a likely obstacle. The President, this election year, will not be able to escape with a shrewd sleight-of-hand measure such as he dealt the silverites and inflationists in the past few years. Any playing or temporizing with inflation at the present time would be disastrous for him personally...