The affront of water divining to the latter's modernist pretensions led to foreign experts being pressed into the fray, but to no avail. |
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Secrets, lies, scandals, corruption, bribery and pretensions have made a laughing stock of Indian cricket. |
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The industry is so ripe with foolishness, pretensions and self-loathing that nothing can be said or done to make it appear even more foolish. |
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For as long as I can remember, my home city has had pretensions to be something that it is not. |
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Even TV cartoons with artistic pretensions tend to be about as low as low art can get. |
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For all its pretensions towards reinvention, Glasgow remained deeply suspicious of the avant-garde. |
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Although primarily a critique of the subtle exercise of power, Veblen's book gained popularity as a biting satire of upper-class pretensions. |
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Given the Forum's multicultural pretensions, it is a cruel irony that the Tibetan monks were swiftly banished from the beanfeast. |
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He had then made the time-worn accusation that the pretensions of the courts reduced the kingdom to an aristocracy of magistrates. |
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In February 1992, Rabbi Shach, himself an eminent Rabbi, branded the Lubavitcher Rebbe as a heretic, who harboured messianic pretensions. |
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But subsequent reading of the play clarifies little and amounts to less, merely confirming his pretensions and misguidedness. |
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He wasn't especially harsh, but he reminded me of my short-sightedness and silly academic pretensions. |
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Only the united Balkan peoples can give a real rebuff to the shameless pretensions of tsarism and European imperialism. |
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However, an ivory plaque of Christ blessing Otto II and Theophano shows how the match could dignify Saxon imperial pretensions. |
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A person's mental health may be unfavourably affected by excessive pretensions. |
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He has pretensions to be a serious novelist but mostly confines himself to namechecking Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness At Noon. |
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Emma is a comic figure partly because of the preposterous nature of her snobbish pretensions. |
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So it's no surprise that she doesn't appeal on any level to the nouveau-riche pretensions of this gaggle of white suburban yuppies. |
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For those with artistic pretensions, he advises on how to stay sane while nurturing creative flow. |
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She saw Clint as an aging pretty-boy, a gifted entertainer with overblown artistic pretensions. |
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Their behaviour and pretensions were overblown but they put out a good deal of material that retains vitality more than 30 years later. |
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The pan-Arabism and socialist pretensions of the era have left only a few decaying fragments. |
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For all their pretensions to being empirical and hard-nosed, most business decisions are guided by pure intuition and wild hunches. |
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In truth, he was a remote, inaccessible figure to most tribal people, and his traditionalist pretensions were rarely accepted at face value. |
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She'd had this disagreement many times with Andy, and he'd always trumped her with what he called her pretensions to commonness. |
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The pretensions and pieties of national leaders merit an outpouring of derision and scorn. |
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His writing has more the intensity of an Old Testament prophet pointing out the pretensions of worldly kings. |
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The filmmaking duo are being cool about coolness, cynical about cynicism, and critical of pretensions. |
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His girlfriend runs a laundromat with an iron fist and has no time for his artistic pretensions. |
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This much may be expected of a state with pretensions to sovereignty and legitimacy, and certainly this much may be expected of good neighbours. |
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By the end of that decade, any pretensions to national independence had become thoroughly discredited. |
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If grilled about it in a focus group, I'd admit that the pretensions and some of the practices of social research make me uneasy. |
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It's all great fun and manages some terrific gags along the way, savaging lots of Hollywood pretensions and familiar scams. |
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I would also march in the streets for my right to argue against its literary pretensions. |
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Today, you have a new generation of books and authors with no literary pretensions. |
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More biased to on-road luxury, with no real sporting pretensions and limited off-road capability. |
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It's quite possibly the worst film in the series, and is certainly the most meaningless, despite its shadows of thematic pretensions. |
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None of the leads have any pretensions of making an astute character study or biting social commentary. |
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With its suffocating pretensions and frequent idiocies, television has always cried out for sardonic mockery. |
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The important thing is that no one with literary pretensions should be allowed near the project! |
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His ideological pretensions, which justified the mass murder of political opponents, had acquired religious overtones. |
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Maybe I'll throw my literary pretensions out of the window for a while and try hurling a few oddly-shaped shards of prose in your direction. |
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It was the supreme anthem of renunciation, of scorn, of derision at the pretensions of the ungifted and the insensitive. |
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On his way to Damascus, Maritain was knocked off his despairing pretensions and turned toward sainthood. |
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Where better to locate a grandiose businessman with small-town pretensions, brazen ambition and borderline criminality? |
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Everyone will have scholarly and literary pretensions, scholars will become self-opinionated and fond of endless disputation. |
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Everybody sees through their warp, through their bias, through their pretensions, through their needs all of that. |
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The party had merely added a veneer of justification by using its revolutionary pretensions to justify its authoritarian methods. |
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Even philosophical critics of rationalism pay reason the back-handed compliment of arguing against its pretensions. |
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Dunne, a silver-voiced soprano with aristocratic pretensions equal to any White Russian, had a great time in the role. |
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Davis jettisons all pretensions to nostalgic Englishness and anchors the works firmly in the European post-Romantic tradition. |
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This surprises me for I've always thought of him as an exacting craftsman and, therefore, leery of artistic pretensions. |
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Gillray so lovingly renders the popinjay, and we laugh so deeply at his pretensions, that the savagery of the social criticism, though devastating, is somewhat mitigated. |
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Bekhterev's reflexology had pretensions to explain social phenomena, and could thus be denounced as a heretical challenger to historical materialism. |
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The film has no pretensions to be a psychological treatise, but its depiction of repressed passion, and the frustrations of those on the outer, is subtle and knowing. |
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Preferably female and extremely annoying, with literary pretensions. |
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Jim Harrison steps out of that tradition, but with contempt for its pretensions. |
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Meanwhile, his twin brother Donald is writing his own screenplay, a shameless potboiler that has no pretensions of art, but every intention of wealth. |
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She showed the desperateness of suffering, a woman's incredible patience with injustice and finally, a lowbrow grace that is not common in a world filled with pretensions. |
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Like Aerosmith at its best, Buckcherry has both the rhythmic sway to go with its rock-and-roll stomp and the raw charisma to get away with its period pretensions. |
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We passed on it in favor of a steakhouse down the street with one thing on the menu, filet mignon in four sizes, he making no pretensions of being an epicure. |
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It's not exactly simple, but it has no pretensions to art either. |
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Ellen set aside all pretensions and spoke as honestly as she knew how. |
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Conrad condemned the abuses of the Belgians, and he condemned a little bit of the excesses and pretensions of the English, but he saw no alternative to colonialism. |
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While a movie like The Scorpion King has mythic pretensions, it merely parades lifeless mythic cliches that lack the timeless gravity of moral tales. |
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The titles and pretensions of professional status just serve to hide that. |
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Buying fresh bread, hot out of the oven, now appears as a luxurious exercise only possible in expensive delis or 24 hour shops with pretensions above their station. |
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Another teen romance with pretensions of saying something more. |
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Spam has retained some popularity in various parts of the world, although regarded with disfavour by those who eschew processed foods or have pretensions to gourmet status. |
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The only one that has been put with any force in favour of work which has no pretensions to literary or artistic merit, is that it may have a psychotherapeutic value. |
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All artifice, all human pretensions and deceptions are stripped away, to the extent that the reader has to fight the urge not to avert their eyes, so intimate is what is left. |
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The Seven series Forensic Investigators is much better, locally made and far more gripping than the pretensions of a couple of would be Pommy Poirots. |
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They were remarkable affairs, not in the scale of their pretensions, but in their all-inclusive nature. |
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Fortunately, the touchy-feely New Age pretensions don't spoil the fun. |
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The character is all Ivy-league pretensions and affected accent. |
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While some players were tapping deep into their reserves, those with pretensions to the title were husbanding their resources in preparation for the second week. |
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The O contained a whimsical smiley face, a wry, self-deprecating wink at the pretensions of power. |
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We are so covered with layers and layers of refinement, of social polish, of airs and graces and civilization and pretensions that the human in us almost ceases to exist. |
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Third, the secularism of the Azeri model gives the lie to the millenarian pretensions of Iran's theocracy. |
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Agincourt also held out the promise that Henry's pretensions to the French throne might be realised. |
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After 1471, Edward IV had preferred to belittle Henry's pretensions to the crown, and made only sporadic attempts to secure him. |
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At the first wind of adversity, its elaborate pretensions collapsed like a house of cards. |
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His presence, after all, disturbs our arrogant pretensions and suitheistic fantasies. |
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For a much cheaper alternative, Italian Prosecco is sweeter, frothier and flightier and certainly has no pretensions. |
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Augustine, however, at first attracted by Neoplatonism, rejects in the City of God any pretensions to divinize citizens by means of the state. |
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Wire took punk's Situationist opportunities and gave every art school kiddie with Duchampian pretensions a reason to join the pogoing oiks. |
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The duchy of Benevento maintained its sovereignty in the face of the pretensions of both the Western and Eastern Empires. |
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The fall is indeed the archetypal bathetic motion, a sudden, surprising downward rush degrading the pretensions of posture and man's bipedal pride. |
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The boards of trade and chambers of commerce were largely made up of men who, while assuming the most vaniloquent pretensions, were themselves malodorous with fraud. |
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This is a little philosophical drama exploring the possibility, and the limits, of poetic vision, the vatic pretensions of poetry, and its potential narcissism. |
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Gertrude Stein, who might, in her time, have been considered a bit of a bossyboots herself, suggested that semicolons were simply commas with pretensions. |
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It followed the Late Gothic Perpendicular style and was superseded by Elizabethan architecture from about 1560 in domestic building of any pretensions to fashion. |
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The construction of Charlotte Street was financed by David Dale, whose former pretensions can be gauged by the one remaining house, now run by the National Trust for Scotland. |
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More often, badges commemorated some remarkable exploit, illustrated a family or feudal alliance, or indicated some territorial rights or pretensions. |
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Decades before Robert Venturi and Leon Krier exposed to public ridicule the pretensions of unexamined Modernism, Rowe began its systematic debagging. |
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Likewise with the Executive Department, Edwin Corwin observed that the Court does sometimes rebuff presidential pretensions, but it more often tries to rationalize them. |
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Both men railed against the evils and phony pretensions of partyism. |
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