Word: parvenu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stinging fable tells of a blithe young actress who marries an aging, swashbuckling wartime hero, then finds herself brutally snubbed by the petted women of Yugoslavia's bureaucratic clique. In violently purple prose, Djilas lashes at this "sham aristocracy" which, "when not loafing about in their magnificent parvenu offices, moved from place to place, lived in their own select and restricted summer resorts, gathered in their own exclusive theaters and stadium boxes." The point of Djilas' attack is not privilege itself, but privilege in the hands of those who had betrayed the revolution, who fed the country...
Braine's novel, in fact, presents a startling parallel to The Red and the Black. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal's masterpiece, Hero Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) is a handsome young parvenu of considerable practical intelligence. Rising 25, he sits at his desk in the town hall and dreams the usual "clerk's dream" of sports "cars, town houses, Riviera villas, linen sheets-and women who look right in them. "I'm going to have the lot," he announces grimly one day, and, like Sorel, he sets his cap for the daughter (Heather Sears...
...Cabinet of the Fifth Republic sat in dutiful silence at the foot of his dais, De Gaulle announced that he himself would speak for France at the prospective summit meeting-though, naturally, "with Premier Michel Debré at my side." With the disdain of a prince for a parvenu, he shot a derisive shaft at Khrushchev, "whom I met not so very long ago in Moscow in Stalin's entourage and who has come some distance since...
...that once knew only fishing boats, as many as 80 yachts may lie at anchor. The narrow streets hum with Ferraris, Lancias, Mercedes and Aston Martins. To be seen at the wheel of a mere Jaguar or Austin-Healey is considered ordinary. To drive a Thunderbird is definitely parvenu...
...Review editor, fairly radiates integrity. He worships Partner Henry Knox, the kindly, austere senior who regards his firm as "a group of gentlemen loosely associated by a common enthusiasm for the practice of law," and has nothing but lofty contempt for Partner Sheridan Dale, the go-getting parvenu who thinks of his job as "big business...