Over a career spent scheming in the back rooms of Japanese politics, he has made and broken alliances, toppled governments and, with laconic disdain, treated transparency and other democratic norms as so many Western pretences.
In fact, with many universities dropping any pretence of academia and existing as sausage factories for the knowledge economy, you'd have to have buried your head deep in the sand to have avoided talking about what happens after uni – work, a career, or the lack thereof.
Relief was given according to a prescribed quantity of labour, and was calculated to put an end to the "false and frivolous pretences" under which many people were believed to have found relief.
Contemporaries such as General William Irvine criticized Howe as "having a talent ... of finding many supposed obstructions, and barely plausible pretences for his delay" in assaulting Verplanck's Point.
Given the difficulty of parking the real thing, many directors have understandably opted for pretence or suggestion.
Speak if this be pretence!" is just one of the many choice phrases that, somehow, this assured cast is able to make sound natural.
This is an old phenomenon, famously noticed by Adam Smith, who complained in the late 18th century that many professors at Oxford had given up even the pretence of teaching.
Indeed, if you look at the text surrounding the famous quote, it's pretty clearly about money: "Our assemblies have of late had so many supply bill, and of such different kinds, rejected, on various pretences," wrote Franklin.
The Cambodian courts make little pretence at being independent from political interference, and many will see this verdict in that light.
Schiele found himself surrounded and attacked by this social climate and his work is, among many other things, an effort to strip away the lies and surface pretences at large in the city in which he lived.
