cleverness

But don’t focus on the cleverness: focus on the affection.

So she does the first thing that clues us in to the cleverness of the enterprise.

The meat of the matter is the Penguin’s drive to become the city’s criminal kingpin, which involves a good bit of lying, betrayal, some murder and more cleverness than his enemies credit him with.

A familiar resolution deflates the status the movie had earned up until that point as a wildly unpredictable work of trashy cleverness.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.