The passion that flowed through his veins was both invigorating and poisonous to him.
Bobby is so lovable to the other villagers that some of them almost hate him for it, but the darkness at the centre of his life is a poisonous father willing him to fail, just as the father's boyhood joy was crushed by his own father before.
He couldn't forget the time when, shooting in a Sudanese refugee camp for Newsweek, he awakened in the night and found a sea of poisonous vipers beneath him.
Vince Vaughn is the ideal actor for the part; he's the natural contemporary counterpart to Jackie Gleason, the eruptively big-hearted, swaggering dreamer whose blend of real vitality and poisonous pride drives him into crazy schemes that never pan out, and whose delusions of practical grandeur threaten the relationships that his actual emotional grandeur inspires.
But while Paulhus doesn't excuse cruelty, his approach has been more detached, like a zoologist studying poisonous insects – allowing him to build a "taxonomy", as he calls it, of the different flavours of everyday evil.
The following year, as Jeffrey Toobin explained, Oklahoma chose it as a supposedly humane alternative to the then-preferred, clearly excruciating methods of execution — strapping a convict to a chair and pulsing electricity through his body until he died of shock or choking him to death by making him breathe poisonous gas in a sealed chamber.
He's poisonous, he's idiotic, he's a demagogue — but we should invite him in with a smile.
No worries: nothing poisonous had ever got him.
He left his role after a bitter bout of infighting during which some of his critics branded him a "poisonous" influence on Farage, to whom he remains close.
It was "scandalous" that the Crown had sought to rely on her word to prosecute Mr Huhne after what had been a "poisonous campaign" conducted against him, said his barrister John Kelsey-Fry.
