Word: mountebanking
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Leading the latest procession from parlor to bedroom is the incomparable mountebank, Clifton Webb, gracefully balancing Noel's sheaf of tarts and darts. He hits the razor's edge with every gesture, shrug and intonation. Up against this kind of finesse Monty Wooley would be made to look like a blundering clod. Portraying the actor whose life aim begins and ends with his own convenience, Webb does a pungently sophisticated job of lechery and of molding the lives of the satellite circle of blustering men and urbane women who serve as his foils...
Always a Crisis. Congress had shown indecision and small courage, ducked unpleasant decisions (e.g., the draft law extension, fair employment practices, a minimum wage, OPA) when it could. The people of Mississippi were glad to send a mountebank back to represent them in the Senate for six more years. Congressman Andrew Jackson May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee and loudest voice in military matters, was accused of having aided wartime profiteers and chiselers...
...Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th-century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world...
Author Train's Ephraim Tutt, says Tutt, is not the real Tutt. Train's Tutt, he continues, is not even consistent, changes from story to story, from "mountebank to philosopher, from shyster to philanthropist, from lawbreaker to up holder of the Constitution." The real Tutt is a rebel...
...bouffe laid in the West Indies of a century ago, The Pirate tells how the young wife of a fat dullard feasts on stories of an amorous pirate named Estramudo. A mountebank comes by, warms to the lady, tries to win her favor by claiming to be Estramudo. (Actually, her own husband is.) These and a lot of other old-fashioned absurdities of plot are blown up with old-fashioned extravagances of diction. Now & then a flash of wit serves for punctuation...