Man Who Could

At the Duplex on Sheridan Square, the blond-goateed bartender upstairs, who gave his name as C.T., served his Long Island iced tea in a pear-shaped punch glass, shooting the Coca-Cola into it with his mixer hose like a man who could spit on your head from fourteen stories up. 

Or consider the case of a young man who could not decide his feelings for the women he was dating ... 

At last, Angel sighted her Lord General, in conference with a huddle of field commanders, around which this whole illusion of chaos appeared to flow, like the grain around a knot of wood. He stood, as always, above it all and in command. If there was ever a man who could make the dream come true, it was Razum Kinzhal. 

We went to Dean Pegram, who was then the man who could carry out magic around the university, and we explained to him that we needed a big room. And when we say big we meant a really big room Perhaps he made a crack about a church not being the most suited place for a physics laboratory... but I think a church would have been just precisely what we wanted. Well, he scouted around the campus and we went with him to dark corridors and under various heating pipes and so on to visit possible sites for this experiment and eventually a big room, not a church, but something that might have been compared in size with a church was discovered in Schermerhorn [Hall]. 

The point was made quite explicitly in a recent review of The Man Who Could See Through Time, a play by Terri Wagener in which a physics professor and a young sculptor debate science and art. Reviewing the play in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote ... 

He is a man who could manage not only an estate but a whole state, Kostanzhonglo said. If I were the ruler of a state, I would at once make him my Minister of Finance. ... 

Hinton alone had the complete fascinating picture and he had to supply the enthusiasm, inspiration, drive and sense of urgency, and I know of no other man who could have taken the programme to completion in the allotted time. .. but I doubt if all the acrimony and bad feeling which he engendered were necessary. .. 

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