"It was always a bit of a bastard stepchild for artists," he said.
It is at best, a corrupt simulacrum; I think of Frederick Douglass arraigning his native land for practicing a "bastard republicanism, a sham democracy," because of its embrace of slavery.
Theresa May may well have sinister designs of her own for the UK's hospitals, and is therefore aware that the best person to carry out such reforms is a man with a reputation for being a bastard.
To be hated by your own step-mother for being a bastard is one thing, but to be delegated to a life of sharing bunks with crusty aged-men is a brooding agitator.
In one case, the defendant was prosecuted for calling God a bastard; in another, for stating that the devil was as merciful as God.
Alone in the graveyard, the feckless groupie cleared his throat for the inevitable what-a-bastard coda.
She starts with Chris by calling him a bastard for being a terrible brother to her, berating him for all the bullying treatment he had given her over the years, and how he never takes her side against their parents.
Here, we're told he's an early riser; there, a bastard for his lie-ins.
Recently, he called his father a bastard for forbidding him to watch South Park.
This new project should be called "About a Bastard," for it requires Grant to play an Englishman, Martin Tweed, from whom all trace of virtue appears to have been surgically extracted.
