Word: bumptiousness
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Scheel's successor as Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister is another Free Democrat: portly, bumptious Hans-Dietrich Genscher, 47, possibly the least likely top diplomat in West German history. Genscher has virtually no experience in foreign affairs and speaks only German. As Minister of the Interior since 1969, he encouraged modernization of German police departments and established a strong law-and-order image by capturing the Baader-Meinhof gang of bomb-throwing anarchists. Genscher lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and began a tough program to protect the environment. In an April poll, he ranked just behind...
...lugubrious about all this. As in his earlier volumes he maintains, through Jenkins, the tolerantly amused air of a man who can come to terms with almost anything, preferably over drinks and with some gossip and a laugh or two thrown in. He can even endure Kenneth Widmerpool, that bumptious, obtuse careerist who has moved like an inexorable force through the entire series. Widmerpool, it now appears, is never going to get the comeuppance he deserves. In Temporary Kings he has a close scrape over a bit of cold-war espionage, but extricates his questionable honor and career, typically...
When it came to name-calling, Whitlam gave more than he got. In Australia's rambunctious House of Representatives, where debate is often a euphemism for denunciation, Whitlam has described Liberal Cabinet ministers variously as "bumptious bastard," "queen," "dingo" (Australia's version of a coyote) and something that Hansard recorded as "runt" (which at least rhymed with the actual word). He once became so enraged with one Liberal minister that he dumped a glass of water on him. That minister was Paul Hasluck, who later became Governor General of Australia and, in an antipodean twist of fate, found...
...disappointed. For what we have here is not realism, but natural supernaturalism turned loose on middle America. Imagine Winesburg, Ohio or Faulkner's Sartor is as they might have been written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bulging with genius and philosophy, the poet paints the dusty jailhouse and the bumptious mayor of Batavia, N.Y. He records the hairs in the disappointed husband's stew, quotes upbeat statistics from the Reader's Digest. But with the same acceptance of reality he observes the growling of the mastiff bitch as dark spirits pass, repeals the laws of gravity at will...
...local officials, Hobson has probably done more than any other man, black or white, to bring about positive change in Washington, particularly in public school integration and civilian hiring practices. Even his enemies-and they are legion-will admit that. But then, they will not have to endure his bumptious assaults much longer. Julius Hobson, 50, is dying of bone cancer...