Word: mountebanking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...graduating class of the R.A.F. College at Cranwell. England, Air Marshal Sir Richard Atcherley, chief of the service's flight training program, confided: "You are going to be passed out by a mountebank who never passed in." The Atcherley secret: on their first try for Cranwell, Sir Richard and his twin brother David (killed in a 1952 air crash) flunked their physicals, he for weak eyes, David for a tricky kidney. Two months later they tried again. "In a contingency of this sort," said the marshal, "there are obvious advantages in being twins. So when we returned, with very...
...Racketeer is about a Neapolitan mountebank (Toto) who lives a dog's life at the heels of un guappo (Pasquale Cennamo)-a big vegetable in the Neapolitan underworld. When the hood has a heart attack...
...Cabinet of Dr. Caligari describes a mountebank monk's visit to a small German town. Apparently Dr. Caligari wishes to exhibit his somnambulist at the town's fair. But a series of unexplained murders follows their arrival. At last Dr. Caligari is caught and led off in a strait-jacket. This story, however, is told by a young man in an institution. When the director of the institution walks among his patients after the story, he himself appears to be Dr. Caligari. Recognizing him, the patient screams, "You are Dr. Caligari!" and he too is led off in a strait...
...climax came when he found himself the star guest at the Lord Mayor of London's Guildhall banquet, pumping out, to roars of well-fed applause, an oration on "the virtues of patriotism, religion, and motherhood." "I knew ... I was behaving like a mountebank ... I saw myself as completely insincere . . . And more, I began dimly to discern how much attention I had paid to the wrong things in life, and how little to the right...
Author d'Eaubonne affects to have translated her novel from the 16th Century Flemish memoir of one Jan van Ster-teen, an atheistic painter who, toward the year 1595, met up in London with a traveling mountebank named Jonathan William Anthony Oldhorse. Oldhorse, a born leader, forms a blood-brotherhood between the Fleming, a gay young Frenchman named Marie-Jean-Pierre Saint-Benoist, and a pensive Jew named Jacob Keepjeke. They all agree to obey Old-horse to the death, and soon...