Word: pompous
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Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., then 37 and a Senator from Massachusetts: "He is rather pompous for his age and decidedly interested first and foremost in his own career...
...Will and Idea, Bishop Berkeley's assertion that existence is dependent upon individual perception; Hume's denial of the existence of absolute space. For Borges' admirers, the delicious point is simply that he takes reality with a grain of salt. Great events, vast trends, the pompous certainties implied by the French phrase grands mots -all these are not for Borges. History, that troubling angular presence that the middle-aged invoke to prove to the young that nothing ever really changes or can be changed, may not exist at all. In a typically brief but suggestive essay, significantly...
...humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted." Today's scholars are more likely to complain that Gibbon was weak on the Byzantine and that he was most responsive to Romans like the Augustans, who resembled himself: "Urbane, accomplished, and occasionally a trifle pompous," as Peter Quennell put it in a Gibbon profile. Despite his limits, unpredictably, erratically, marvelously, Gibbon and Rome did go together. "Gibbon is a kind of bridge," Thomas Carlyle once summed him up, "that connects the antique with the modern ages." These memoirs, composed in a number of drafts, were...
WARREN MOTLEY is an unusually sympathetic Polonius-less pompous than confused. Michael Ladner and Celestine are very good as Polonius's children, Laertes and Ophelia. Each plays his character very young, and the scene in which they say goodbye to each other as Laertes leaves for Wittenburg is a delight-Laertes trying to be big brother while Ophelia teases and hugs...
Without Actually Cheating) to the last (Golfmanship), can easily be absorbed at one sitting. In any of them, it is impossible to miss Potter's point: that anyone can triumph over all the pompous types who hog the center of the stage -the long-winded bore, the authority, the physician, the superior competitor. How? By using stratagems of such seeming innocence and such Machiavellian obliqueness that the victim scarcely knows he has been pinked. Thus one day, playing golf with a friend, Potter asked "a bit of a favor" on the third hole. But he delayed revealing what...