Charles II was determined to match his French counterpart, Louis XIV, in extravagant ambition.
As a striver, he valued ambition above all ("If you put wishing at the heart of human development, you make extravagant ambition your theme," Phillips writes); at the same time, he empathized with people who lose everything.
Others object to its extravagant commercial ambitions.
The film critic Stuart Klawans has written a fascinating book called "Film Follies," which deals with movies so extravagant in their ambitions as to blur the boundary between artistic inspiration and mania.
Veronica, the female protagonist in his first Broadway show, the exciting and enjoyable "The Motherfucker with the Hat" (2011), has a coke problem, but that nasty drug doesn't so much get her high as help her manage her extravagant and disappointed ambitions.
It's the directors who have summered at Camp Auteur that you really have to watch out for -- not so much their extravagant and out-of-control ambition, as their inability to fulfill it.
Taxes as a proportion of national income are now on a firmly rising trend, climbing roughly in parallel with the ambition of the government's extravagant promises of improvements in public services.Let it rainIf those improvements materialise, then Britain may well judge that higher taxes are a price worth paying.
In fact, Mohseni has been called the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, and though the comparison is extravagant, it gives a sense of his influence and ambition.
This orientation, outfitted with the visual inspirations that were ready to hand in the snazzy kitsch of his mother's shop, the extravagant local Mardi Gras, and popular broadsheet illustration, channelled his ambition and gave it tremendous propulsive force.
The Smith Center, with its dazzlingly ostentatious architectural ambition — very much in keeping with the nothing-is-too-extravagant spirit of Las Vegas — has set out to change that.
