Word: pompousness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that was literally impossible. Napoleon would hide from his guards, dress his servant in his clothing, start a panic, then shake his head gleefully over the stupidity of the English. Such small victories tightened the restrictions around him. His last struggle was his five-year fight with short, redheaded, pompous, shifty-eyed Sir Hudson Lowe, which ended with Napoleon's death and left Lowe disgraced and almost...
...Thomas Inskip, the pompous new Secretary for Coordination of Defense (TIME, March 23), reported on British Rearmament in an emotional rather than factual vein, "I have never believed and refuse to believe that war is inevitable," affirmed Sir Thomas. "I am not going to admit the British Navy has met an opponent which cannot be mastered.... It is suggested that the growth of air power has destroyed our historic security as an island. That is only a fraction of the truth. . . . We have a long start over anyone who is ill-advised enough to meddle with our freedom...
Inhibited by the need for keeping professional secrets from criminals, officers of the law usually write books that have all the bad features of detective stories and none of their ingenuity. By no means so pompous in his professional recollections as Sir Basil Thomson, onetime chief of Scotland Yard (The Story of Scotland Yard), Melvin Horace Purvis, onetime head of the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nevertheless falls into the literary ambush that has trapped so many of his predecessors, composing an account that contains two parts of philosophizing on crime to every one part of concrete...
...above its predecessors in its sincerity and candor, Honorable Estate is like them in the number of its characters as well as in the grim picture of English social decay that it communicates. It tells two major stories: one of Janet Rutherston, confused, vacillating, dissatisfied wife of a pompous churchman; the other of Ruth Alleyndene, intelligent, sensitive daughter of a manufacturer, who marries Janet's son. Janet's story, occupying the first part of the book, is the more convincing and original, despite the facts that it is mixed up with long digressions about the suffraget movement...
...every hospital, an undertaker, and various electricians, street repair men, and maintenance trucks. The ensuing riot not only convinces Bennett that Grant is the right man for her, but greatly amused the critic and the rest of the audience. Grant is a superb drunk, Conrad Nagel plays perfectly the pompous writer, and another stand-out performance comes from William Demarest, the sympathetic gangster...