It was soon obvious that Mr. Kunchikuy had a first-rate mind, so Mr. McMeekin sponsored his education and a home-stay visit to Boston, where in the winter he encountered a puzzling white substance that was very cold.
Hilmes acknowledges her cleverness and her bad luck, but, alas, rushes to express his incredulity that a man such as Liszt should settle for a first-rate mind when it isn't attached to feminine pulchritude.
Lee has a first-rate mind, speaks in the proper English he polished at Cambridge University and defends repressive policies with a thoughtfulness and vigor that make Western democrats squirm.
He was referred to by The Life Insurance Council of New York as a "giant in the insurance industry" and as an "extraordinary champion of the actuarial profession" by the current President of the Academy of Actuaries, Bill Bluhm, who also wrote, "He was an amazing individual, blessed with a first-rate mind, a great heart, and a vibrant personality.
Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I'll bet you he could name the author of "Peregrine Pickle".
Unless he has a first-rate mind, merciless self-appraisal, and honesty too large to force his world on a larger one he becomes an artist as warped as his own psyche; and you get ugliness, negation, and nonessentials substituted for the blood of great art".
As for Mr Blair, his biographer quotes Derry Irvine, now the Lord Chancellor, as saying that young Tony did not get a first because "he simply didn't exert himself .Any irritation felt by Mr Blair at this is likely to have been heightened by the fact that Lord Jenkins made it clear that he regarded Gordon Brown, the chancellor, and Mr Blair's long-time friend and rival, as a first-rate mind.
He's a lightweight, a first-degree self-publicist with a second-rate mind.
Being the frustrated, unappreciated wife of an incompetent spy "with a second-rate mind" who apparently let the Cambridge spy ring operate under his nose?
The principal of her college, Somerville, the distinguished, radical haematologist Janet Vaughan, dismissed her as "a second-rate mind", the ultimate academic put-down.
Three-quarters of a century later, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a similar assessment of the newly elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he briskly pronounced: "A first-rate temperament, a second-rate mind".
