Word: mountebanking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without knowing it even while they were denouncing Shaw as a mountebank and a playboy. Trotsky lamented that Shaw was a good man fallen among Fabians. But Shaw knew his Englishman and loved him, as the stinging fly loves the thick hide it farsightedly chooses as a safe home for its eggs...
...seems to have been proud of was his own failure to earn more than ?6 by novels and casual writing before he was 40. To the hostile, Shaw's trotting to Moscow and his defense of tyrants seemed a mixture of cynicism, contemptible prudence, and an old mountebank's determination to keep in the limelight; a degeneration from the noble pages of The Intelligent Woman's Guide...
...prefers to voyage off to worlds that never were, and to return from them with his own devil-may-care impressions. To his admirers he is a restless, inventive, original genius. To his critics, including some of the other topnotchers in the school of Paris, he is a talented mountebank and irrepressible showman who has lured his followers and the world up a blind artistic and intellectual alley...