Beijing might, in fact, describe the UK somewhat as Lord Macartney, the first British envoy to China, described China: "An old, crazy, first-rate man of war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat... .. China, of course, has no need to force open our economy, because we begged for its cooperation.
A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive.
Here is Mencken on the South: "There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac".
And yet divorce, for all Wharton's consideration of it as a subject and her tacit support of it as a right, is possibly the most fearsome enterprise of all… Edmund Wilson observed, rather testily, just a few years after Wharton's death, that "there are no first-rate men" in her novels.
"We could not understand why he put so much trust in Hibben, who was distinctly a second-rate man," Professor Charles McIlwain 1874 remembered.
To Sumner Welles, then the under secretary of state and a friend of Roosevelt, Churchill was "a drunken sot" and "a third- or fourth-rate man".
Lincoln patiently tolerated them even as they raged that he was an opportunist — "a first-rate second-rate man," in the opinion of the antislavery agitator Wendell Phillips, "a mere convenience waiting like any other broomstick to be used".
Andrew Bonar Law, the Tory leader, is "a cunning, unreal creature" and, elsewhere, "a fifth-rate man"."The Tory party just now in England has little or no real brains and a poor education.
Robert Moses, who had previously referred to the city's leaders as "third-rate men," simply paid tribute to Governor Smith.
"The vice presidency became a second-rate office, something to which only second-rate men would aspire," Mr. Tally wrote in "Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle," and he said that Clinton led the parade of mediocrity.
The filmmakers expect us to understand that the two male characters are second-rate teachers and second-rate men, too; that a perceptive woman like Terry should have her own career; that both couples got married when they were far too young.
