Word: charlatan
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...World War I. To his military superiors he was a popinjay. To the Arabs he was Sheikh Dinamit, the spirit of the wind who led them to victory over the detested Turk. To Biographer Richard Aldington he was a cad and a bounder-sado-masochistic, hemi-homosexual, selfpublicizing charlatan whose actual role in the Arab revolt was small and whose subsequent career as a technician in the R.A.F. was merely a theatrical gesture of humility. To Winston Churchill he was "one of the greatest beings alive in our time," a man of vast abilities who could write (Seven Pillars...
When the pratfall and pie-in-the-puss comedy tires him, Comic Wisdom resorts to a genus of comedy that in seven films (all hits) and numberless TV shows he has failed to master: pantomime. While allowing himself to be duped by a charlatan of a music-hall star (played to seedy perfection by Jerry Desmonde), he lisps, giggles, gawks, grimaces, mugs and burbles. "Aggressive," is his psychiatrist's diagnosis at film's end. "I think you'd better grow up a little...
...ends as a smutty soap opera badly in need of soap. It is notable largely for the crass calculation with which author and publisher can manufacture an almost certain bestseller, as well as for one of its few serious points, made when Dr. Chapman is denounced as the egocentric charlatan he is: "You speak of love in numbers. Human beings are hardly numbers at all. No numbers can add up devotion, tenderness, trust, pity, sacrifice, intimacy...
...production, the play reaches brilliantly, perhaps too slickly, into its legendary hero's mind, illuminating but never completely resolving the essential enigma: Was Lawrence the spectacular hero who inspired and led the Arabs in their World War I revolt against the Turks, or was he a lying, unstable charlatan...
...great Tunguska depression in Siberia, actually caused by the fall of a meteor in 1908, had really resulted from the explosion of a nuclear-powered spaceship attempting to land on earth. Reputable Soviet meteor experts and astronomers ridiculed Kazantsev's theory and accused him of being a charlatan and a cheap sensationalist, but his theories continued to turn up in the Literary Gazette, the publication of the Soviet Writers Union. Last week the Gazette opened its pages to Valentin Rich and Mikhail Chernenkov, who made Kazantsev's imagination seem earthbound indeed. Starting from the premise that earth cannot...