He hasn't had much of a chart presence since the early 1990s, when he was seen cavorting around with a gold, pistol-shaped microphone making the ostentatious claim that he was "all alone in a villa on the Riviera".
Modest in his bearing, he did not claim ostentatious honours such as frequent consulships or numerous imperial salutations, and he mixed easily with senators on terms of cordial friendship.
You obsess over the stall's ostentatious style and his bogus claims he's a self-made man worth billions.
Today, on the other hand, such a claim would sound not only ostentatious but redundant: CanLit, as we often call it, having flailed in the nineteen-seventies through an adolescent phase full of anxious self-definition, is now generally thought to include any work by a Canadian citizen.
He reserves special contempt for Staffan de Mistura, a senior United Natons official who flabbergasted Security Council members and journalists by claiming that Saddam's ostentatious palaces were much admired by Iraqis, who expected their leader to live in such splendor.
He claims that attempting to impress your neighbours with ostentatious displays of wealth is now out of fashion.
Her critics charge that she is cut-throat and corrupt in the pursuit of power, and that she lavishes more money on ostentatious displays of status than on serving the poor she claims to represent.
Perhaps Rose is aware that after all the trouble caused by bankers flashing their bonuses and MPs claiming thousands of pounds for antique furnishings, displays of ostentatious wealth are out of sync with the public mood.
Hawkins's biography of Johnson, published in 1787, ended not with a tribute to its august subject, but instead with an attack on Barber, culminating in the claim that his profligacy "may serve as a caveat against ostentatious bounty [and] favour to negroes".
And yet it was here that Reza Shah, Iran's penultimate monarch, contrived to claim that he remained true to his roots – despite living in the most ostentatious surroundings imaginable – by shunning his bed and sleeping on the floor like the soldier he once was.
They claim that shuffling – or "cutting shapes", as it's also known – is aggressive, ostentatious peacocking that just makes people look like pricks.
