Word: poltroons
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Author Fraser, 56, an excellent popular historian (The Steel Bonnets) as well as a prolific screenwriter (The Three-and Four-Musketeers), is best known for his seven Flashman novels, the saga of a Falstaffian poltroon who for sheer cad-dishness has no equal in contemporary literature. Like the Flashman mock memoirs, which skewer the Victorian scene with such wealth of detail that many American reviewers at first thought them to be authentic historical documents, Mr. American teems with minutiae ranging from the price of the London & Northwestern train trip from Liverpool to London (just under $6, first class) to details...
...novel, Thackeray used a torrent of words to demonstrate Barry's lack of self-knowledge. Narrating his own story, Barry so obviously exaggerates his claims to exemplary behavior that the reader perceives he is essentially a braggart and poltroon. Daringly, Kubrick uses silence to make the same point. "People like Barry are successful because they are not obvious-they don't announce themselves," says Kubrick. So it is mainly by the look in Ryan O'Neal's eyes-a sharp glint when he spies the main chance, a gaze of hurt befuddlement when things go awry...
...easy it is to submit to blackmail when you give away the rights of other people! I nominate Bruno Kreisky for Poltroon of the Year...
...scorching June day in 1778, Major General Charles Lee had ordered the Continental army to retreat before the redcoats. Then, in the nick of time, Washington, accompanied by a cockaded Alexander Hamilton and a bareheaded Marquis de Lafayette, gallops up to rally the troops and confound the crestfallen poltroon Lee,* slumping in his saddle. History records a piqued Washington demanding in Olympian tones: "I desire to know, sir, what is the reason, whence arises this disorder and confusion...
...Revolution's Henry ("Light-horse Harry") Lee, or his son Robert E. Lee. Thirty years later, Lafayette, who did not witness the episode himself, started the story that Washington called Lee a "damned poltroon" on this occasion. Most historians don't believe it. *But later drew on the tactical talents of another warrior of the Revolution, John Paul Jones. In the Russo-Turkish war of 1787-91, Jones was a rear admiral with Catherine's Black Sea fleet, fought in several engagements...