Word: pompousness
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Barrie's play is typically charming. As a vehicle for his irony, he depicted a situation in which an eminently self-satisfied gentleman and knight-elect hires a woman to type up replies to congratulatory letters. She turns out to be his former wife. Richard Smithies plays the pompous Sir Harry, in a loud and brusque manner quite suitable to the part. His secretary Kate is acted by Jo Linch in a style appropriately different from Sir Harry's. She is not animated, but placidly content--almost too serious; yet her benign laughter at him makes her restraint very convincing...
Goodman has written breezily, with a happy choice of similes and popular idoms. Sometimes he relishes phrases which are deliberately pompous, almost Dickensian. When several of his college friends once enjoyed too much of his grandfather's brandy, Charlie lay in bed that night and smiled at the "regurgitory choruses" issuing from the bathroom...
...measured against his contemporaries in the German language-Gerhart Hauptmann, Rilke, Kafka, Stefan Zweig et al.-Mann was still a giant. And against charges that he was "Olympian," "pompous," "ponderous," he could well defend himself: "My endeavor," he wrote, "is to make the heavy light; my ideal is clarity; and if I write long sentences-a tendency inherent in the German tongue-I make it my business, not without success, to maintain the utmost transparency and spoken rhythm." In German he was an exquisite stylist, and he brought to that language a new sensitivity in the art of storytelling...
...Naked Emperors. Goya's foreign contemporaries -Guardi, Gainsborough, Fragonard-specialized in elegance. Goya did too, but instinctively pricked the bubbles he blew, fastening on the frivolous, pompous and stupid personalities inside the fine clothes of his noble sitters. Like the naked emperor of the fable, they seemed not to notice. Charles IV made him court painter and gave him a carriage. Occasionally Goya was commissioned to portray a beautiful woman, which enabled him to exhibit a warmer side. Friends who sat for him got off lightly; he could still admire...
Casting Shakespeare in modern dress, Orson Welles sleight-of-handed Caesar the role of a fascist. Hollywood's Joe Mankiewicz saw his Caesar as a kind of tired, pompous stockbroker. Shaw's hero in Caesar and Cleopatra is a worldly-wise but disenchanted superman whom power has made not mad, but sad. Front-rank Historical Novelist Duggan (The Little Emperors) throws dirt on these literary ghosts by spading straight for the facts and unearthing many a fascinating shard from ancient Roman political life...