(quote, headword in italics)1879: AUTHOR UNKNOWN, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, p101
…character of his work, its broken lights, its aimless passions, its catastrophes manqués, may be serving a better purpose than any regularity of art.
(quote, headword in italics)1983: David Roger Oldroyd & Ian Langham, The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, p9
Naturism is in the romantic tradition and, to some extent, the naturist writers are natural historians manqués.
1991: Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, pⅩⅢ
To be sure, Moonstone has its share of smug, self-satisfied provincials — Thea’s father, her siblings, Lily Fisher, Mrs. Archie — but the town also offers Thea an unusual cast of wanderers, artists manqués, and free spirits who recognize her specialness.
1991: Ilya Zemtsov, Encyclopedia of Soviet Life, p221
Party functionaries at all levels are essentially dilettantes who may have diplomas or study certificates but not real competence. Basically, they are educational failures: engineers manqués, journalists manqués, scientists manqués.
(quote, headword in italics)1996: Lohser, Beate, and Peter M. Newton, Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch, p153
Obviously, Freud and Kohut would have answered the question of what is curative in the psychoanalysis of such patients differently, but what is clear, in any event, is that Freud was not thinking of his patients — regardless of diagnosis — as adults manqués, or children masquerading as grown-ups, who need to be parented or coddled into health.
(quote, headword in italics)2001: Alister Edgar McGrath, A Scientific Theology, p30
A new way of reading the earlier philosophical tradition developed, with Leibniz, Hume and Kant being read through Fregean–Wittgensteinian spectacles as ‘analytical philosophers manqués’.
2004: Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, p14
None of these papers had much chance of getting past a journal referee. Few of the writers had much hope of even getting into graduate school. They may not have wanted to. The letters were mostly a cri de cœur from isolated and solitary physicists manqués all over the world.
Musicians Sandro and Valentino, the new young owners of this ex-pensione (aka the Locanda degli Artisti / Artists’ Inn), are creating here a haven for artists, artists manqués, and students.
2006: Harry Mount, Amo, Amas, Amat… and all that: How to become a Latin lover (ISBN: 1–904977–54–5 [978–1–904977–54–4]), chapter Ⅵ: "To all the Sirs I’ve loved Before — LATIN TEACHERS I HAVE KNOWN", page 97
The classics master is a quick literary shortcut to encapsulating a lonely, highly intelligent man dedicated to his subject, and often to his pupils. They are never in fiction — and rarely in real life — female. They are often dons manqués — men who, due to a personality fault, or an unfortunate incident with a boy, never made it as academics. And so they become, life Dr Rutherford, substitute dons at school, keen on building up one-to-one relationships with the pupils and dismissive of their contemporaries in the school common-room.
