Word: parvenu
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...cash and precious stones at up to 80 secret sites around Hong Kong, in supposedly propitious feng shui rituals, and that Wang had paid him at least $250 million for this and similar pieces of advice. Not content with such a spectacular windfall, the caddish Chan - the kind of parvenu, incidentally, who names his eldest son Wealthee - considers himself entitled the rest of her estate, even though he would be depriving a charity of its use, should he win control...
...London, where it played as a tragedy, Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest has been reborn in Los Angeles as a gothic comedy. Glenn Close dispels her chilly screen persona as a manipulative and shamelessly camp-melodramatic bygone movie queen, a legend in her own mind. John Napier's parvenu palazzo set is the grandest and wittiest of the British megamusical...
...situation sounds dire, it is actually much improved. In 1997, a year after watching parvenu Atlanta turn the Olympics into the world's largest county fair--lots of ads, lots of barbecue, no gravitas--the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) awarded the 2004 Games to Athens. The only reason was history. For 1,200 years--from the mid-700s B.C. to the end of the 4th century A.D.--tens of thousands of spectators from across the ancient world descended on the fields of Olympia to watch athletes compete. Wars were suspended, clothes were stripped off, and wine was devoured in what...
...Italy," says Sancton, "but none more fascinating than Silvio Berlusconi." Sancton has been tracking Berlusconi's career since the 1980s when the ebullient entrepreneur took part in launching France's first private TV network - to the horror of a French cultural establishment that viewed him as a vulgar Italian parvenu. "When I heard Berlusconi was mounting a bid to run for Prime Minister in 1994, I thought it was just a publicity stunt to promote his business interests," says Sancton. But when he won, it was clear that a major change had taken place in Italian political life...
...Erap, had never been popular among the gentrified élite, those wealthy descendants of Spanish colonialists who comprised the well-heeled Makati and Forbes Park power brokers. They viewed Estrada, who boasted about his middle-class origins and was proud of his capacious appetites, as something of a parvenu, an uncouth impostor in the palace. His clique of shady Chinese business cronies and provincial politicians was regarded as proof that Estrada was a second-rater, unfit to rule and certainly not one to act in the best interests of the Philippines. And they had their reasons to doubt his policies...