Word: vainest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bold signature at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence is one of the richest men in the Colonies and one of those most adored by the crowds. He is also one of the vainest. Unsatisfied by his largely ceremonial post as President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock of Massachusetts yearned to be Commander of the Continental Army. When General Washington was named instead, one witness noted a "sudden and striking change of countenance-mortification and resentment." Offered the chairmanship of Congress's Marine Committee, Hancock is now trying to make sure that the most lavishly outfitted ship...
...Burton had found a century earlier, the Somalis are among the bravest, vainest, crudest and also friendliest races in Africa. They possess enormous self-respect. Somalis love to fight, set great store in a killing well done, and do not mind dying. Hanley recalls coming upon a Somali who had just finished butchering a fellow tribesman. He expressed anxiety only when he realized that Hanley was not going to shoot him on the spot. "You're not going to start all that court business, are you?" asked the murderer as he was led away...
...Hugh Sidey's assessment of Lyndon B. Johnson should be preserved in the National Archives as the best assessment to date of the vainest, most temperamental, blundering egotist to serve in the White House...
Ruben's Life of Marie de Medici by Jacques Thuillair. 158 pages, plus 108 color pages. Abrams. $125. In 1622 history's richest and most lavish painter was retained by the vainest and most powerful woman in France to create an appropriate tribute to herself. The result -more than a score of enormous panels-now fills a whole room of the Louvre. There visitors are free to ramble past acres of pearly, naked flesh and hectares of jewels and velvet, observing Marie, attended by nymphs, monsters, peacocks, courtiers, gods, satyrs and angels, as she makes a near mythological...