Word: pompous
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...triplicate to staunch Harvard Dilbert and Sullivan patrons. John McKean seems to have found, in Ralph Rackstraw, the Gilbertian lead to which he is best suited. The part calls for rapid changes of character: from a caricature of soulfulness to impetuosity to prideful rage to rapture to despair to pompous authority and back, finally, to rapture. That McKean can make so many transitions so rapidly is itself a feat worthy of praise; that he makes them so smoothly and so convincingly is simply amazing...
...figure of Princess Ida, the element of absurdity added by the contrast of her size to that of Jeff Davies is more than worth this minor disadvantage. Davies, the third improved veteran, has what superficially appears an easy task as Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B.; he must consistently be a pompous nurd. However, English nurdiness is not the easiest of qualities to maintain, particularly for a Welshman, and his hysterically funny success in doing so is certainly the strongest characterization in the entire cast...
...their allies had clearly violated Harvard's tradition of open communication and rational discourse. Yet there was some feeling on campus that Nathan Pusey himself, in a much lesser way, might have violated the tradition by summoning the police without gaining a consensus of his community. A distant and pompous-seeming figure to undergraduates ever since he became president in 1953, Pusey rules his campus more like a guiding presence than an order-giving commander, and he has admitted to being perplexed by youthful demands for instant action. At the same time, he says that he admires the idealism...
...problems for his would-be bioggraphers as they rushed their books to press. The better of the biographies restricted themselves to recounting his career. Too many of the others filled the void with scribblings ranging from near slander to the vaguest musings about the man's personal affairs to pompous pronouncements on his virtues and shortcomings. As a result, Dag Hammarskjold the man remained an enigma to all but the circle of his closer friends...
...true, to the final exhausted syllable. The villagers are a finely balanced mixture of arrogance and dread. Kafka's tales all take place in limbo; the movie fills its snowbound setting with an unworldly black-comic air appropriate to the author, whom Thomas Mann called "a religious humorist." Pompous officials deliver pronunciamentos even when there is no one left to listen. A girl tumbles into the surveyor's bed-and exhibits neither love nor lust. The sullen winter light reveals the endless decay of life...