Word: conceit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bitterly regretted ever having written it, confessing that he did it chiefly because he needed the money. But even before he finished the last chapter, he was suffering from brief spasms of self-knowledge. "Every idiot who has ever met me," he wrote, "talks of my extraordinary conceit. Perhaps, since my revelation of Shakespeare, I have taken myself too seriously...
...round collar and benevolent simper, and makes him a vicar. Sellers gets better and better even if his movies do not. Cinema spoof British-style keeps searching farther and wider for ideas, and audiences have only to consult the credits for proof: this film was based on a conceit of that self-ordained iconoclast, Malcolm Muggeridge...
...mild comic conceit at best, and time has made the resulting camouflage and persiflage dimly dispiriting. In 1936, Russia was remotely terrible but not dangerous, still exotic enough for period romance and period humor, attitudes no 1963 playgoer can sustain. Tovarich needed a boldly inventive face lifting, but its book and lyrics sadly sag. Its tune-shy music may please any metronomes in the audience. Sample wit: "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a potato and make our own vodka." Sample lyric...
...uncritically generous-at birth, any little quarterly could count on a blurb and a bouquet of free poems as a present from him. He had no vanity, no avarice, no conceit, but he had strong and angry flashes of pride that described him perfectly in his poet's pose...
...novelty of the play wears more slowly but less well. It is Ustinov's clever conceit to do a kind of drawing-room philosopher's Ages of Man: Old Sam (Ustinov) at 80 is confronted with himself at 60, 40, 20, and even as a baby. The four grown Sams share the stage together, and with all the amusing ironies of hindsight and foreknowledge relive key episodes in their communal life. Sam at 20 (John Horton) is an ardent lyric poet and marathon runner, at 40 (Donald Davis) a disgruntled fictional crafts man of obscure worst-sellers...