Word: rakishness
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...likeness of an anti-Semitic cartoon," though he became an Anglican; the other a man who often seemed shallow and without strong roots. Both made their contemporaries uneasy for reasons that could not always be spelled out. Each in his time was underestimated by others, Disraeli because of his rakish dilettantism, Nixon because of his bland ordinariness. Both were dismissed as opportunists; few perceived the fire within. Neither of them ever gave up. "Disraeli," admitted his great rival William Gladstone, "is a man who is never beaten. Every reverse, every defeat is to him only an admonition to wait...
...flashback and as a ghost. The whole work is framed as an answer to the question of why Westminster Abbey would not allow Byron's body to be interred there. Thomson might almost have called it "One Sinner in Three Acts," because he dwells almost exclusively on the rakish side of Byron's character-his playboy excesses, his foppish haughtiness, his promiscuous escapades with both sexes. The listener must take Byron's poetic and personal genius on faith...
...Although responsible to different chains of command, the commercial and armed navies often work in tandem. A visit to a neutral port by a Russian freighter, for instance, may be followed by a request for docking privileges by a trawler fleet-then by the flag-showing appearance of a rakish, gray-hulled missile cruiser...
...midst of it all, Laurent's precocity impresses almost everyone: he writes fine essays on Camus and on suicide for his teacher at school, wins his mother's heart with his advanced sensitivity, and delights his brothers by adeptly following in their not-quite-rakish footsteps. He only manages to annoy his conservative father because of his lack of table-manners...
...monstrous red tongue coils sadistically from the label of a new rock LP called Sticky Fingers. On the jacket, the waist-to-thigh portion of a man's jeans has been caught in a moment of rakish nonchalance. In the appropriate place, a working four-inch zipper hangs invitingly. Beneath the zipper lies another waist-to-thigh photograph, this one naked save for a pair of white jockey shorts and bearing the logotype of the noted dispose-all artist, Andy Warhol (see ART). As a record-store attraction, the album is positively too dreadful to ignore...