Word: mountebank
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...lost her lands and family because they fell out of favor with the crown. It also places her in some amusingly bad company--a sexually voracious Cardinal (Jonathan Pryce), a courtier who is too clever by half (Simon Baker), a fake noble husband (Adrien Brody) and the mystic mountebank Cagliostro (Christopher Walken, who is, as always, deliciously weird). You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans...
...During a brief moment in Shakespeare's play when Coriolanus has agreed to flatter the masses, he promises, "I'll mountebank their loves." That brings up the subject of William Jefferson Clinton, who is America's outstanding mountebank of love. Much of his own crowd has now turned on Clinton and cast him down from the Tarpeian Rock. Hard to think of Clinton as Coriolanus, of course; the Roman was a man of fierce principle. Clinton is more like Sportin' Life. Our first black president, as Toni Morrison called him, has banished himself to 125th Street, there to condescend...
Dirksen's oratory became, in the end, something of a mountebank performance. William F. Buckley Jr., on the other hand, though capable from time to time of the polysyllabic Dirksen purr, has used public speech for the most serious of intellectual purposes, as a sharply civilized weapon, an instrument of instruction and correction. This, when one is talking politics, is unusual. A protest without a program is mere sentimentality, as a political theorist wrote. Buckley's opinions have always proceeded not from emotion but from a structure of thought - agree with it or not. He appeals to the standard...
...most memorable character: Rockefeller's father, William Avery Rockefeller, a backwoods mountebank and snake-oil pitchman whose history John D. tried to suppress. "Big Bill" Rockefeller, crack shot and con artist, claimed to be a medical doctor and, in the gullible towns of upstate New York and farther west, promised to cure any cancer for $25. Eventually, "Doc" Rockefeller (who made a habit of impregnating the servant girl at home) became a bigamist and started a separate family as "Doctor Levingston"--the name that appears on his tombstone. All his life, Big Bill loved money, and when...
...Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived. How had it happened...