Word: pompousity
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...bachelor at 74, he was buried with great ceremony in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Bach, whose birthday falls this week, came from a long line of musicians and spent almost his entire life in what is now East Germany in the often contentious service of pompous princelings and severe Lutheran rectors. He married twice, fathered 20 children, and died far more renowned for his keyboard playing than for his mostly unpublished cantatas, Masses, sonatas and concertos...
...press release on March 7, ADL president, John F. Magee, announced that "not once have city officials expressed concern to us about the safety of the laboratory." If two years of meetings, special committees, court orders, investigations, and legislation are not "concern," then ADL had better rethink its pompous self-styled role as "Protection for the Intellectual Environment" of Cambridge...
...mark when I met Brezhnev while working on President de Gaulle's visit to Moscow in June 1966. For a long time after World War II, De Gaulle was portrayed by students at the Institute of International Relations as a chicken-brained cog in the military wheel, with pompous ambitions and fascistic dictatorial tendencies. Top political people regularly disparaged him, calling him a "long-nosed frog's legs." But now he was paying an official visit to Moscow, and I was asked to help in preparations...
Makarov was a surly, pompous, sarcastic contrast to Gromyko's cool but generally courteous personality. Gromyko kept him as the perfect watchdog. He scared off intruders. He sheltered his master from unnecessary contacts with lesser humans. Gromyko is an efficient machine, constructed to perform and to endure, and almost completely devoid of human warmth. He can joke and he can rage, but underlying any such expression is a cold discipline that makes him formidable as a superior or as an adversary...
...1960s, when Cheever's first novel. The Wapshot Scandal, began winning awards, and when his reputation as a New Yorker short story staff writer seemed assured, he felt himself on top of the world. But success and celebrity took big toll on Cheever. His daughter claims he became "quite pompous about himself," and his drinking, which had always been heavy according to the socially acceptable fashion of New York literati, became increasingly so. And as Cheever became aware of his homosexuality, his embarrassment over the fact, and his fear of being discovered, further intensified his alcoholism: "I think...