Word: conceit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ghost on My Shoulder. Pilot Bridgeman tells his story with pride but not conceit. He tells of the things he had to learn till they became second nature, e.g., reverse breathing at high altitude, when a tank forces oxygen into his lungs and he has to breathe it out. He explains how many hours he spends studying and how many sweating. Every two weeks for three months he climbed down from the B-29 into his rocket ship. Each time the flight was called off. Finally he began to toss a utilitarian Dixie container, betraying his nervousness, over the side...
...then, "all the layers of egotism, conceit, love and all the ups and downs of daily life" have been stripped away. "Strange, but I didn't feel any resentment or hatred at all," he reports after being tortured. "The cleansing of the spirit makes you see the world from a new level way above what is known as pain or fear." Most affecting of all the letters his mother has collected in this book is the one Kim wrote his sweetheart just before the Nazis executed him in April 1945. Kim, then 21, said: "Promise me-this...
...because Boswell is frank in his conceit and self-evaluations, however, that his journals are a pleasure to road. Humorless, ambitious, stuffy, he wrote down what everyone occasionally thinks. This evidence cannot be used against him by the reader. Though one laughs at Boswell, one cannot but feel a sympathetic bond with him ever almost two hundred years...
...steady stream of undisguised hints wash away any trace of suspense. Against a background of urban England, Oliver, as Edward Bare, plays a limey opportunist who, for a chance to travel abroad, kills one wife and marries a second. A sharp voice for his uneducated but shrewd conceit, the facial expressions which change with the varying moods of flattery and hate, and the complete lack of human warmth all combine to make Bare a wonderful villain. It is this performance which is primarily responsible for keeping the play moving, for he is on the stage almost all the time...
...Navy ivory tower now grown so tall that the big brass not only can't see the trees but are fast losing sight of the forest itself? Of course it is the height of giddy conceit to think that a seagull can be made the bull to a school of whales. The appointment of a naval aviator, Rear Admiral Frank Akers, as ACNO for undersea warfare [TIME, Aug. 24], seems to be forcing just such an arrangement. In their effort to keep apace with the Air Force in projecting themselves into the pushbutton future, the Navy has apparently relegated...