But Churchill said Britain, and others, "must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe".There is something of this Churchillian loftiness in Britain's call for the euro area to follow the logic of integration and save the single currency—as long as Britain is not involved.
Mr Chernow surmises that this failure, puzzling in view of Hamilton's ambition and unbounded talent, was the result partly of timing (others, notably John Adams, were ahead of him in the presidential queue) and partly of Hamilton's loftiness and refusal ever "to master the smooth restraint of a mature politician".
In the religious field, the vigour and boldness expressed in the poems of Seyyid ʿImād al-Dīn Nesīmī (executed c. 1418) left their traces in the work of later poets, none of whom, however, reached his loftiness and grandeur of expression.
This desire for loftiness is neither Classical nor Byzantine but Germanic, and it continued into the Romanesque and Gothic styles.
Although Edmund had been made head of the English hierarchy in a crisis for which he was not prepared, the purity of his motives and the loftiness of his ideals commanded universal respect.
Keats's desire to write something unlike the luxuriant wandering of Endymion is clear, and he thus consciously attempts to emulate the epic loftiness of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
A comic image, if it is poetically comic, carries with it something that is not comic, as in the case of Don Quixote or Falstaff; and the image of something terrible is never, in poetry, without an atoning element of loftiness, goodness and love.
This gift for rising above the catastrophic with a penetrating flippancy – for asserting a personally costly kind of victory over the Establishment by seeing through its values, and with a wry, stoical loftiness, refusing to subscribe to them – makes Everett heaven-casting as the lead in Hare's The Judas Kiss.
And while having the required loftiness, he would also pass Hollywood's "good-looking geek" test.
Written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady turns out to be neither hagiography nor hatchet job, but a sober, well-intentioned attempt to humanise its subject – and who better to humanise her, to add vulnerability to the loftiness, than the hallowed Streep?
Then there's the maddening loftiness to his gnomic utterances, such as "All names, one name", "the logic of North is shattered", and "Time is a lie".
