Among the motifs of this book, never mentioned but nicely implied, is credulousness: audiences were credulous in accepting what showmen like Spurgeon and Owen told them, what impresarios like Barnum showed them, what adventurers like Henry Morton Stanley and Du Chaillu himself described in their breathless, romantic and unverifiable books.
Mr Fearon's feeling for the verse, for the histrionics of "Arise black vengeance" as well as for the aching pathos of "O thou weed, who art so lovely fair" constitutes in itself a sort of explanation for the character's credulousness: a combustible imagination, for which words lyrical, martial, or lubricious are like lighted matches.As for who wins, Iago or Othello the question doesn't arise.
The truth, he maintains, is that the outside world's "credulousness and cowardice" has enabled a "chilling conjuring trick", in which the Chechens' aspirations to self-determination have disappeared behind a "cloud of euphemisms and falsifications".For a start, Chechnya is not legally part of Russia.
The claims were quickly exposed as a fraud, adding a patina of credulousness to genuine research that was already struggling with credibility.
Reading the e-mails, in which Worley displays both cunning and credulousness — sometimes in the same message — it is clear that the Nigerians were able to take advantage of his religious convictions, his stubbornness, and his desire to be a hero to Mrs. Abacha and to his family.
It isn't even a case of the reporter's having fabricated or plagiarized, which are graver wrongs than credulousness, and far harder to fathom.
Ma Jian himself mined some of this in "Red Dust," which seethes with the fraught humanity of a people lurching between credulousness and opportunism, deprivation and semi-bourgeois respectability.
The result is universal credulousness and universal fear.
Cynicism always sounds smarter than credulousness.
Michael falls for the manipulation, of course, and his credulousness made us feel the sort of sadness we feel when a computer outplays Garry Kasparov.
