Applying the same thunderous template to the chirpy Hobbit, however, required adroit footwork to avoid the feeling that the whole thing had been padded out.
As a myth debunker Richardson, however, is unsurpassed, adroit at peeling the layers: first, those of Picasso himself, then the second generation contemporary witnesses who often rewrote history, then the third generation anecdotal whispers, the fourth generation scholarly reckoning, and so on, often a daisy chain of prior confabulation.
The Tories are not yet that adroit.
The real secret to her success, however, may be in her adroit scrambling of traditional leftist and rightist positions.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis.
Nonetheless, he proved adroit at both deals and arrangements.
He was inevitably slower, but still skilful and adroit.
However, it wasn't until Lucinda Williams that the adroit lyricist started garnering critical acclaim, and it wasn't until 1998's Car Wheels on a Gravel World (featuring Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris) that Williams hit pay-dirt and bagged herself a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
By World War II, however, this kind of biography had been discredited; Strachey's adroit detachment and literary skill were recognized to be his true value, not his dangerously interpretative method; and, since that time, biography has steadied into an established, if highly varied, form of literature.
