Word: shrewd
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...Roiphe's shrewd observations have an ugly undercurrent. At one point she suggests that accounts of rape given at the marches may be fabricated or embellished: "The line between fact and fiction is a delicate one when it comes to survivor stories," she writes. "It's impossible to tell how many of these stories are authentic, faithful accounts of what actually happened. They all sound tinny, staged." Her insinuation is a cheap shot, unprovable and callous...
Andrew Motion, a fellow poet and younger colleague of Larkin's at Hull, gets close to his subject, but not too close, in this finely nuanced book. The biographer is as shrewd and sympathetic in sorting out Larkin's surprisingly energetic sex life as in parsing his poems. Larkin's longest attachment (38 years) was with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester University. About halfway through this affair he took up with Maeve Brennan, a library staff member at Hull, and a few years later he added his secretary, Betty Mackereth. The point was to play one woman off against...
...itself. Now Ted Turner is infallible. When it was announced last week that his company would buy Castle Rock Entertainment, an A-list movie-production company, and New Line Cinema, a scrappy little quasi-studio, for more than half a billion dollars, practically no one said it wasn't shrewd. But, in fact, the expert consensus on Turner looks wrong once again...
...action was classic Bennett. The lawyer likes to combine shrewd use of the media with concern for his client's state of mind. Says Weinberger, who was indicted (and pardoned) for his role in the Iran-contra affair: "Bob is crucial because of the terrorist approach of prosecutors. They hope the person they target will fold up, blow away and plead guilty...
...second villain appears from over another horizon -- that of the future, perhaps. He is Mox Mox, not so much a Western badman as a modern serial killer who likes to burn people. And Garza, the bank robber, is shown to be as shrewd and ruthless as Call in his prime, and much quicker. Ranger or not, Call is really too old for this kind of thing...