out-Heroding

He could recognize that type of man at once — the servant of a tyrant, and in close personal association with him, modelling his conduct not on the tyrant's, but on what he fancied should be the correct behaviour of a tyrant, far out-Heroding Herod in arbitrariness and cruelty.

Flying Colours Forester, C. S. 1938

Fabian Researcher, but who now turned out to be a Demon Pianist out-Heroding (my secretary put in two rs, and explains that she was thinking of Harrods) Svengali.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton Maisie Ward 1932

Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their largely frequented _tables-d'hôte_."

The Merry-Go-Round Carl Van Vechten 1922

Gilbert Tennant, imitating Whitefield and out-heroding Herod, exhausted ecclesiastical billingsgate in quest of terms to characterize those clergymen -- Congregational or Presbyterian or

Beginnings of the American People Carl Lotus Becker 1909

Others, again, out-Heroding Herod, suggested that the frigates and transports at Alexandria should be taken to pieces and conveyed on camels 'backs to Suez, there to be used for the invasion of

The Life of Napoleon I (Volume 1 of 2) John Holland Rose 1898

When I am by myself I can curse and swear, play Termagant and rehearse an extravaganza out-Heroding all the Herods that ever Heroded.

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne : a Novel William John Locke 1896

The _Père Duchesne_, copies of which are at this day among the greatest of bibliographical curiosities, was written for the people and in a jargon out-Heroding their own, a compound of oaths and obscenities.

The French Revolution A Short History 1893

He had the best education of the time, coming, as he did, from a line of scholars, and out-Heroding them in the variety and curiousness of his accomplishments, and in the number of his published

The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 From Discovery of America October 12, 1492 to Battle of Lexington April 19, 1775 Julian Hawthorne 1890

What have the votaries of pure physical science, who hold the barren word - contests of theology and the proud pretensions of philosophy in such contempt, to do out-Heroding Herod in that fashion, and venturing on metaphysical assertions of such a sort?

Expositions of Holy Scripture: the Acts Alexander Maclaren 1868

He had worked himself, by way of doing the country squire completely, into a disgust of the old exile, far out-Heroding what he had heard from

My Young Alcides Charlotte Mary Yonge 1862