Word: poseur
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years in prison for Nazi espionage; in a New York City hospital on Welfare Island. A soldier of fortune who played his crafty hand against England for more than 40 years, Duquesne dated his checkered career as international intriguer back to the Boer War (1899-1902). A cool, cunning poseur, he signed his reports to Germany with a rubber-stamp cat's paw, claimed to have plotted the sinking (1916) of Lord Kitchener's cruiser Hampshire. Chief G-man J. Edgar Hoover called his concerted FBI swoop (in 1941) on Duquesne's New York City...
...Sonia Grant, although she is funny from time to time, does not seem to make nearly as much of 'Arsinoe as she might. It is difficult to forget that she is acting. Tom Whedon is at his very best in making the effeminate fop Clitandre a most unmitigated poseur, and shows how much can be done with a relatively minor part...
...members of the ancient Académie took a bold step in amending its reputation for crusty conservatism by receiving into their august midst a literary figure as contentious as he is unpredictable. The new member: Jean Cocteau, poet, painter, novelist, dancer, movie producer (Blood of a Poet), playwright, poseur and talker. Now 66 and still savoring his reputation as France's esthetic enfant terrible, Cocteau in times past has taken a gamin's delight in cocking a snook at the stuffy academicians. But things change, he explained, and "one wants to be oneself and yet the opposite...
Personality: "Bloody executioner, trusted slave" (Marshal Sokolovsky). "He is a babbling Belgrade parrot ... a bad actor. Imitating that hypocrite and poseur Churchill, Tito wanted to be a hunter, writer and chess player, but like Churchill he is a bad shot, a still worse writer, and at chess he is beaten even by the lowbrow Pijade . . . Greedy and insatiable as Goering." (Literary Gazette...
...friends of Lawrence were asked to rebut its accusations. Lawrence of Arabia, A Biographical Enquiry, by Novelist Richard Aldington, says without mincing words that, far from being a hero, Lawrence of Arabia was a misbegotten fraud, a perverted charlatan, a pretentious demagogue, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur, a liar and a plain fake. The effect, as one paper put it, was "as if someone charged that Nelson knew nothing about the sea." "Is this the end of a legend?" asked a sign printed in scarlet letters in the window of Foyle's, London's leading bookstore...