Word: snob
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Felix Frankfurter was a Jewish immigrant who became an Anglophile snob. He was a shameless flatterer who fired a secretary for flattering him. He could be sparkling, open and warm. He could also be strident, bitter and neurotic. Fifteen years after his death, Frankfurter remains one of the most influential jurists of this century. Yet while serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, he increasingly failed to sway his colleagues. He was an early supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a defender of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet, as a Justice, he spent 24 years vainly trying to halt...
...best of "when I grow up I want to be" genre is a $40 dollhouse fashioned to teach youngsters how to be interior decorators in the best suburban snob-zoning tradition...
Waugh partially was the curmudgeonly Blimp he invented for himself. He proudly described himself as a "snob . . . a bigot and a philistine" to various friends, but then seemed hurt when outsiders found him as obnoxious as he tried to be. He was also, as his letters reveal, generous in praising contemporaries like Graham Greene, George Orwell and Anthony Powell and encouraging to such newcomers as Louis Auchincloss and Thomas Merton. He was not entirely the Tory skinflint that his denunciations of the welfare state suggested; he assigned a number of foreign royalties to Catholic charities. His prejudices were surprisingly flexible...
There is something to be said for snob bery: it often makes the best diarists. Bea ton is intolerant, wicked-eyed and totally devoid of a social conscience that might make him hedge his words. With acid and pastel, he describes people not as they should be, or would wish to be, but just as they...
...Nazi war criminals, then on trial in Nuremberg, Churchill was typically direct. "Bump 'em off," he growled, "but don't prolong the agony." Evelyn Waugh, an old enemy from school days, receives the worst treatment, and for a telling reason. "In our own way we were both snobs," Beaton admits, "and no snob welcomes another who has risen with him." When the novelist dies in 1966, he writes: "So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery...