Word: feckless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Egypt's pleasure-sated ex-King Farouk, most feckless monarch of modern times, celebrated the third anniversary of his dethronement by calling in Paris newsmen and weeping like a Nile crocodile over the plight of his former subjects. Blubbered fat, foolish Farouk, while sipping unloaded mineral water (booze was never one of his vices): "The revolution has turned into a tyrannical dictatorship. The army officers, the so-called 'liberators,' have become small despots. Egypt is now a police state and the Egyptians are a captive people...
...successful missionaries. At the sight of the ragged friars padding doggedly through the mountains, the Indians sighed, "Motolinia, motolinia [Poor, poor fellows]." Generations of such brave, tough motolinias from Spain finally converted Mexico.* But on the Indians' simple faith, the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico grew fat and feckless. Prelates exacted tremendous fees, gobbled up land and abused their ecclesiastical powers, e.g., one archbishop excommunicated a group of pulque brewers for adulterating their product. Republican thought was ruthlessly suppressed; following the American Revolution, the church censored all discussion of the U.S. Constitution...
Todd Lincoln. Following six previous biographical novels, e.g., Lust for Life (Painter Van Gogh). The President's Lady (Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel), his latest has the birthmarks of another big bestseller. As Stone's Lincoln steps onstage, he is a feckless, unkempt rube who wolfs his food and says, "Ain't that a caution!" Mary Todd, on the other hand, is "quality folks," with a vocabulary of Basic French (au revoir, soupcon, carte blanche). In Stone's version, it is not Lincoln who lifts himself to eminence by his bootstraps, but Mary who raises...
Disorganized, confused, divided, Western delegations took to blaming their allies. The U.S. delegates bitterly complained that Churchill had let the West down, blamed the weakness of the French government for the crisis, complained about feckless, fun-loving Bao Dai. "It's hard to say that the Vietnamese are struggling for their independence when their leader spends most of his time at Cannes with a bunch of blondes," grumbled...
...earlier Waugh stooge-heroes whose very decency caused them to be trampled underfoot by hemen, clawed apart by harpies, robbed of their rights by double-dealers-and then trounced by Evelyn Waugh into the bargain. World War II finds Guy a dispossessed man in every sense, abandoned by a feckless wife, deprived of spiritual zest by isolation. Waugh is frank to admit that to a man like Guy, World War II was a matter for "jubilation...