Because he's comfortable in his own skin, he doesn't put on any pretences... he's a good man".
But it was as flimsy a pretence as any economic miracle based on consumer credit and an insanely inflated London house market.
I was having a ball playing the policeman in a children's TV show called Brum, and like so many vain actors, I would happily watch myself back on screen while maintaining a pretence that seeing myself perform was a challenging task.
It is a show, a token, a pretence of a strut on the world stage.
However, in practice the Agta's case is indeed exemplary of 'manipulative participation', in which case 'Participation is simply a pretence, with "people's" representatives on official boards but who are unelected and have no power' (Pretty 1995:1252).
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the convoy was a "pretence", that allowed Russia to encroach on Ukraine through unauthorised means.
But on Thatcher's watch, Britishness was now just bunting, a Falklands mug, a pretence.
George Osborne can't even muster a pretence.
Mr Bacon holds, however, with many others, that this fear on the part of the South of a Republican President was not so much the motive as the pretence for secession, and that in order to ensure the possession of so fair a pretence for alarm the Southern party divided their votes in the elections so as to make certain their own defeat.
It would just be a pretence, thinking that they understood the implications.
Daniel Day Lewis According to Harvey Weinstein, Day-Lewis was taking time off to work as a cobbler in Florence when the Hollywood super-producer teamed up with director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio to lure him back to New York "on false pretences" so they could persuade him to play Bill the Butcher in 2002's Gangs of New York.
