Word: humbugging
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Critic KENNETH TYNAN, also in the Observer-He was without doubt a great writer ... He attempted, and almost pulled off, two mountainous tasks: he cleared the English stage of humbug, and the English mind of cant ... As a demolition expert he has no rivals: and we are being grossly irrelevant if we ask a demolition expert, when his work is done: "But what have you created?" It is like expecting a bulldozer to build the Tower of Pisa; or condemning a bayonet for not being a plough. Shaw's genius was for intellectual slum-clearance, not for town planning...
...prevent him (after taking the Colonial Secretary and wife to the opera) from making a last-minute suggestion that the decisions of the present Security Council should be cleared through the British Parliament. The suggestion drew a hoot of derision from Lee: "Incredible political ineptitude . . . Never has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by such a leadership...
...British were inclined to agree about Marshall's talent for humbug and his unreliability as a negotiator, but their distaste for the new Asian demagogy did nothing to speed a solution to the problem of unstable Singapore. Lennox-Boyd was left to utter that inevitable Colonial Secretary's remark: "We, for our part, have done...
...tribute to Great-Uncle Jesse Knight, a multimillionaire mine owner, and one of early Utah's most colorful citizens. One night in a dream, Uncle Jesse received instructions through a "manifestation" (a Mormon expression for a message from on high) to stake a claim at the supposedly worthless Humbug property. He struck gold, silver and lead, made $30 million, then gave most of it away to the church and various charities, was known for the rest of his life as "The Dream Man of Utah...
...Europe one sees, behind an imposing façade of socialist voting strength, symptoms of doubt, confusion and intellectual decay. So far as Karl Marx is remembered at all, there is a growing realization that, far from being an infallible prophet, history has proved him a pretentious humbug, dismally wrong in some of his most fundamental dogmas...