Word: mountebanks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director, writer, scene designer and onetime actor, Franco Zeffirelli talks and acts like a mountebank, but he is a man of considerable talent and great versatility. "I am," he declares grandly, "the flag-bearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theater...
...coverage of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, H. L. Mencken mercilessly shredded the arguments of Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, who served as a special prosecutor against the teacher of Darwin's theory. Wrote Mencken: "The mountebank Bryan, parading the streets in his seersucker coat, is pointed out to sucklings as the greatest man since Abraham." Was such reporting an attempt to influence the outcome of the trial...
...supercilious mountebank operating as a false-front intellectual, and wholly dependent for effect upon his unquestioned virtuosity as a gesticulator with hands, face and words. ARNOLD B. LARSON Manhattan Beach, Calif...
Lazarillo's last master, as far as the film is concerned, is a mountebank who dresses as a priest and then goes plodding about the boondocks, babbling dog Latin and dispensing illicit indulgences for the sins of an apparently endless supply of village idiots. In his new employment, Lazarillo frequently suffers pangs of conscience, but he seldom suffers pangs of hunger; and in the last reel he regretfully decides that, the world being what it is, survival depends less on nourishing the soul than on feeding the face...
Nothing Personal. In this atmosphere, Daily Editor Gary Althen, 21, this fall allowed Carl Mitcham, 26, a late-blooming philosophy student, to publish a polemic calling Goldwater "a fool, a mountebank, a murderer, no better than a common criminal." Campus conservatives informed Goldwater. President Newton apologized. Unsatisfied, Goldwater wrote a stinging reply: "You either do not know what is going on in the university, or you don't care, and in charity I will presume the former. To put it briefly, I doubt that you have the interest or the concern to be in the position you hold...