Word: mountebanking
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...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...
...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...