Word: shrewd
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...fortune of some $60 million (which will tide him through the London embassy's estimated excess expenditure of $50,000 a year above the ambassador's $27,500-a-year salary and allowances), but he has always managed to combine the graces of a patrician upbringing with shrewd common sense. Once he ordered his name expunged from the New York Social Register because he considered it "a travesty of democracy . . . with absurd notions as to who is and who isn't socially acceptable." When a Florida businessman tried to drive a hard real-estate bargain by whining...
...Enemies. Dynamic, shrewd, almost hypnotic in his molasses-smooth manner, Odie Seagraves earned a reputation as "the man who can borrow more money on less collateral than any man in Texas." Along the way, he made-and invariably lost-staggering fortunes, yet always found the backers for still another deal. "Odie," says an awed and envious rival, "can make a hundred enemies and kiss them all good-bye-and go out and make a hundred friends and get a hundred million...
...LAST HURRAH, by Edwin O'Connor. A lusty, irreverent and affectionate fictional portrait of a shrewd gasbag who became a powerful political boss. The story stays on target so steadily that Boston's ex-Mayor Jim Curley still thinks he was having his picture taken...
...SAILOR, SENSE OF HUMOR & OTHER STORIES, by V. S. Pritchett. Critic Pritchett, who is also one of Britain's top short-story writers, sketching directly from life. The best items in this collection, extremely funny and uncommonly shrewd about people, have the impact of a bitter quarrel overheard...
Club Without Bylaws. Virginia's shrewd, courtly Harry Byrd became governor in 1926. He promptly sponsored a forthright antilynching law (Virginia retains today a poll tax that works not so much against Negroes as against non-Byrd-organized outlanders. who often forget to ante up in time). Byrd also spurned easy, inflationary financing in favor of a pay-as-you-go road plan (tourists in Virginia, who bring in $600 million a year, still drive comfortably along Byrd-planned highways). After Harry Byrd went to the U.S. Senate in 1933, his followers continued to give Virginia good government...