always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience". Elsewhere, Twain calls Roosevelt "the missing link," i.e., the supposed evolutionary place-holder between the ape and Homo sapiens.
When she told him, he took her to the back of his magic shop, into a warehouse with a vast collection of circus objects that he had acquired over the years.
On the one hand, we are getting bread and circuses, vast freebies unimaginable scant years ago -- free e-mail, phone calls and maps, acres of picture space.
I drive back into town, and have a coffee in Drake Circus, the vast shopping centre named after that local icon Francis Drake, who allegedly continued playing bowls on the Hoe having been informed of the approach of the Spanish Armada, and these days lends his name to Top Man, M&S, an Apple Store, and the other staples of 21st century shopping.
When I was in Shanghai on business, about the only thing to do on a free night, after having made the required stroll down the Bund by the river, was to visit the Shanghai Circus in a vast Communist-style People's Auditorium.
Its chariot racing sequences, staged in a vast mock-up of Rome's Circus Maximus, set a high bar for cinematic action for many years.
The vast majority of elephants used by circuses are captured in the wild and suffer both physical and psychological distress from the severely restrictive circus environment.
Most MEPs want to scrap the travelling circus and stay in the vast modern parliament building in Brussels.
Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Madonna festoon their shows with fireworks, crazy hydraulics, "meaningful" am-dram narratives and a vast supporting cast of choirs, dancers and circus performers.
It is rammed with vast and flawed rhetoric; but still The Circus is irrepressible and lovable, and its heart is in the right place.
