Word: shrewd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Written during a hectic three-and-a-half weeks in the summer of 1741, Handel's oratorio has always been a smash. If a nearly endless succession of well-meaning popularizers have taken gross and extravagant liberties with it, Handel is partly to blame. A shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices...
...hyperbole, and uncritical reassessments blossomed in the press. Some critics went so far as to rank him with Sheridan and Wilde, or to call him England's greatest living playwright. Such judgments overlooked the extent to which Coward's work is sheerly theatrical, meaning not only shrewd in stagecraft but also remote from lives and issues outside the theater. The stage is all his world, and players are the only people...
...other decades of his life, Joe Kennedy was a remarkably shrewd, hearty and charming man. He had the serenity of a man totally devoted to his family and the detachment of a lucidly ruthless financier. He moved with an Irish swagger among Presidents, movie stars and corporation bosses, but bequeathed to his sons some of his East Boston toughness. He frequently concealed his taste for classical music lest it be thought effete. One night in the '30s he was listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on a phonograph when a pair of his cronies requested some...
When Joe Kennedy moved from accumulation to preservation of capital, the safest bet seemed to be Manhattan real estate. To his delight, his shrewd broker, John J. Reynolds, the real estate counselor of the archdiocese of New York, made him vastly richer at minimum risk. Gradually, over the past seven or eight years, Ken Industries and the Park Agency, Inc., have disposed of the family's holdings in Manhattan. The golden touch that Kennedy enjoyed in his dealings is illustrated by the largest single transaction in this slow, quiet process of liquidation. In 1943 Kennedy bought the property...
...course, the most pressing question in Gargaliani-other than the outcome of the olive harvest-is when Spiro will come home. He has promised in letters to Andreas to visit the town, but the townspeople are beginning to wonder, in the shrewd fashion of peasants, why he waits so long. The delicacies of international politics that must concern their American cousin-the presence of a military junta in Athens, the absence of a constitutional Parliament-are not easily explained to the good people of sunny Gargaliani...