Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical simply sets Eliot's cat poems to dance and music, providing pure entertainment without the pretense of being profound -- an admirable conceit for a genre that loves to pose its products as serious and intellectual.
After all, the entire thrust of the Dialectic seemed to be directed at "critiquing" and curbing pure reason, and undermining its pretense to any real use.
It is pure action adventure with very little pretense of being anything else.
There is every reason to see all the manliness pretense as a survival mechanism, pure and simple.
Only the pretense was never complete.
It is pure pleasure, whipped up fresh and served up straight, without pretense, whether on the tiny stage of La Bodega or in New York during one of the several appearances she makes each year before a growing crowd of stateside devotees.
The late Justice Scalia's pretense was that "originalism," a doctrine of tracking pure intention alone, could absolve judges from ideology — but, of course, as has been pointed out countless times, the original intentions he found almost always conformed precisely to the prejudices and passion of a right-wing Catholic Republican of the twenty-first century.
Capital punishment operates under a pretense of justice, when in reality it represents pure vengeance and mob retribution, favoring expediency and finality over finding the real killer.
In his autobiography, the rambling flow that has always infused his work liberates itself of any pretense of plot or structure and achieves its purest form.
For all but the anti-scientific fringe of climate change deniers – and their self-interested fellow travelers – pretenses of human control over nature now look like pure folly.
