Word: shamelessness
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...money, made by buying up Continental dollars for pennies when most people thought they would become worthless. Overnight a man of affairs instead of a lowly leather dresser, he was still despised by the other well-to-do. He was uncouth, uneducated, a prodigious boozer and a shameless wencher. His wife was a shrew, his son a boor, his poor daughter none too bright and also addicted to the bottle. Dexter bought the finest house in town, and sat in it spitting tobacco juice on the carpets and getting drunk every night...
...modern Vanbrugh who tells the story, he is a nobody, but he has a spiv's eye for survival, the derisive eloquence of a shameless man and the bogus kind of face that, as he suggests, would go well on a butler or a bishop. As Author Linklater tells it in his savagely comic novel, Vanbrugh spent a profitable war as a wingless wing commander in the R.A.F. and ends his career as a superior flunky in the household of a Texas aristocrat. Says he: "I see my destiny, I recognize my genius ... but England, I have not abandoned...
...chicanery and now at sham, and in between to go in for shenanigans. The central figure is an egomaniac orchestra conductor who, from shattering his musicians' fiddles and his trustees' feelings, can hardly find an orchestra to conduct. On one side he is Blanked by a shameless manager who ten times a day tries to save the day with desperate lies, on the other by a wife who once saved it through charm. Now separated from the maestro, she wants a divorce so she can marry someone else; the litch is that she was not married the first...
...also that the time itself was one of treachery and double-dealing, an age in which England was "almost plagued with brilliance, and swollen with ambition." It was the era of Swift, Defoe, Newton, Wren, Pope -but it was equally an era of savage religious fanaticism, corruption and shameless nepotism (men, said Sarah, anticipating William Gilbert's Sir Joseph Porter, came "to be Admirals without ever having seen water but in a basin...
...Word-wise George Smathers was said to have won over back-country Floridians by malapropian innuendo. Gasped Smathers righteously: "Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extravert! Not only that, but this man had to matriculate before he could go to college, and he has a sister who was once a Thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy...