Word: ruffian
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...spent nine years rooting stones out of his New Hampshire pasture without any converse with the spirit world. There is a wonderful raspberry at Carl Sandburg ("His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none. He is probably the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had"). And in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, an astonishing admission in 1938: "Two years ago I wanted to be a Senator...
Copulating Crocodiles. Despite all this, "Ruffian Dick" and the "White Nigger" were the epithets that polite London society applied to Burton; and Her Majesty's government all but ignored his fantastic, if sometimes freakish, feats. Official distaste began when Burton wrote a detailed study of pederasty among the natives. He was promptly blackballed from future promotion in the British Indian Army. Thereafter, he never rose above the rank of captain or progressed beyond minor consular appointments in a belated career in the British foreign service...
...soon play tennis without a net." Asked whether literature was an escape, he snapped: "The weak think they are escaping; the strong think they are pursuing." In his latter-day person as unofficial poet laureate, he journeyed to Russia and talked to Khrushchev, whom he pronounced "a grand old ruffian," and added with characteristically evenhanded egotism: "We were charmed with each other. I could talk out to him, and he could talk...
Frost called Khrushchev "a kind of ruffian," but, said the poet, "He's our enemy, but he's a great man. He's not a coward. He's not afraid of us, and we're not afraid of him." - Harlem's Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., 53, was in Europe ostensibly to study equality of opportunity for Continental women. He had in tow a couple of shapely technical advisers: Conine Huff, a former Miss U.S.A. contestant (36-24-36) and a $5,014 receptionist in his office, and Mrs. Tamara J. Wall...
Derain's father, a baker, was prosperous enough to want his son to have the most respectable of careers, preferably engineering. But André was already painting, and his best friend was the young ruffian Maurice Vlaminck, whom Papa Derain would not let into the house. Then one day an older painter by the name of Henri Matisse saw some of André's work, spoke so glowingly of his talents and prospects that Derain's father finally relented. Maurice and Andre rented a shack on an island in the Seine, and their careers finally began...