Word: sham
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Scottish cotton-mill owner, Douglas first journeyed to Capri in 1888, on the trail of a rare species of blue lizard, fell in love with the island and made it his soul's operating base. In his middle 40s, he denounced Christian conventions as a sham, declared that Western civilization was inferior to Oriental culture, made a faint bow to convention by closing all letters to his son Robin with: "Brush your teeth twice a day!" He might have made a fortune from his annotated anthology, Some Limericks, but its obscenities would have made its open sale a criminal...
Instead, half a dozen of the more articulate members of this cast of thousands traded truisms in a conversational sham battle that dragged on for dangerously close to three hours. The screen play for "Quo Vadis" is talky enough to have been written by G. Bernard Shaw, except that it sounded a good deal more like Edgar A. Guest...
...strength seems to be drawn from an immense source of nervous energy. This, joined with her sensitivity and fragile beauty, makes it seem impossible that she should last as long as she does under the same strain of guilt which overcomes Macbeth. The sleep-walking scene, when the sham is gone and there is nothing left but the subconscious, is the finest moment of the play...
Labor's façade of unity was a sham, as everyone in Britain knew. As the Scarborough conference broke up, Laborite Rebel Nye Bevan-who hopes to be Britain's next Prime Minister but one-bested all comers in the constituency polls for a new National Executive Committee of the Labor Party. Three of his disciples, including fiery Mrs. Barbara Castle, were elected to serve alongside him on the 25-man committee. Defense Minister Manny Shinwell was beaten. Attlee's moderates, with the powerful bloc votes of the trade unions, still held control of the party...
...appeal to irrelevant interests. You must maintain religion, because it is good for morality and for commerce; you must keep up sports to avoid dissipation and ill health; you must raise armies to avoid war. But if really good only for such purposes, you would have only a sham army, sham sports, and a sham religion...