[Barset]

John Kerry is Obediah Slope in Anthony Trollope's "Barchester Towers" Unctuous, false, wordy...a pursuer of rich women, a self-promoting liar who is scorned and dismissed by real men and women for whom worldly power is too serious a consideration to let the Slopes of the world near it. b

[AnAmericanMother]

John Kerry is Obediah Slope in Anthony Trollope's "Barchester Towers"

Good catch!

Mr Slope is tall, and not ill made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case, with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank, and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision, and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef, - beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy, and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better if it did not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red coloured cork.

I never could endure to shake hands with Mr Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.

Alan Rickman played the man with too much character, but . . .

[AnAmericanMother]

Whoops - posted to myself (I often talk to myself too.)

I take it from your screen name you're a Trollope fan? Which is your favorite? And do you read Thirkell also? (I'll put in a vote for the Hunting Sketches, but only because I hunt.)

[Mr.Atos]

I'm not familiar with the work, but the quote is extremely appropriate...a self-promoting liar who is scorned and dismissed by real men and women for whom worldly power is too serious a consideration to let the Slopes of the world near it.

I can think of no single literary comparisons for Kerry from my own experiences. I might manifest him via a morbid assemblage of James Taggart (Atlas Shrugged) the arrogant zero who feeds on the world's bounty while destroying same; Feyd-Rautha (Dune) Sly malicious royalty directed by a singular ambitious tendancy toward malfeasance; and Magwa (Last of the Mohicans) a savage so consumed with self-loathing and hatred that he is willing to destroy nations to satisfy it's dark lust. Tie this together with Shelley's, Frankenstein... a creature assembled by arrogant tinkerers in the image of a man, yet lacking the moral precepts that govern rational existence, stumbling through the confusion of an unbound life directed by whim, desire, and force.

Atos