contriver

Yet it is still hard for the reader to get truly inside the mind of this complex Kennedy, somehow both a “Machiavellian contriver and man of conscience”.

He had two brothers and one sister, all of whom are thieves, the sister being the contriver of crime, they its executors.

Not at all; its contriver was simply a man who cultivates opportunities—a laborious, pains-taking man, whose life has been a career of labor, of diligent self-improvement, of assiduous cultivation of knowledge.

I think there are as many kinds of gardening as poetry; your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages, and cascades, are Romance writers.

Danton was not a great practical administrator and contriver, like Carnot, for instance.