Word: falstaffian
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...famous oratorical power showed only in faint flashes, usually when he flicked at the critics ("Standing so smiling and carefree at the dispatch box, as if [they] had no responsibility for the shocking and shameful state to which our finances were reduced during [their] tenure . . .") or sniped like a Falstaffian schoolmaster at his hecklers...
Cheer from Coffins. Conscientious Objector Fry was assigned to a Pioneer Corps outfit cleaning up rubble all over bombed Britain. He converted his tough sergeant to Shakespeare and occasionally awed him, when he gave what Fry considered unreasonable orders, with a geyser of Falstaffian curses. After war's end, his Phoenix ran for 64 performances in London's West End. Wrote one critic: "Mr. Fry could make a ghoul laugh ... He gets more cheerfulness out of coffins than most people would from the abolition of bread rationing...
John Barton Townley, 34, is a rich Englishman with a Falstaffian laugh and a weak heart. Because of the heart, his doctor advised him to give up golf and rugger. So Townley, having studied the racing sheets as well as law at Cambridge, bought some race horses. Last week, at Newmarket, his weak heart thumped and bumped under a strain that might have told on stronger...
Traubel's and Melchior's relationship is Falstaffian. In Die Walküre, when Traubel is left alone on stage, Melchior sometimes prances about the wings as a Rhine maiden in a grass skirt, to try to make her laugh. Once, when she leaned tenderly over his body on the couch in the last act of Tristan, in the scene where Tristan dies of wounds inflicted by a jealous rival, Melchior muttered: "Helena, hurry up the Liebestod (love death). I'm hungry and I need a beer...
Jose Iturbi's Falstaffian zest does not begin or end with music. He has logged 1,400 hours as a pilot, over 20 years as a topflight pianist, thousands of miles as a motorcyclist, and hundreds of rounds as an amateur boxer...