impecunious

No “cheap politicians, failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerks, bookkeepers, lawyers, doctors. … We need workers! Hustlers! Men of brains, brawn, and guts! Men who have a little capital and a good deal of energy — first class men!”

When Ian Ross first fetched up in the United States in 1978 — an impish, dimpled and impecunious middle-class Englishman who had been instrumental in the founding of Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station, and who almost as improbably had married into the minor aristocracy — he was one in a wave of expatriate British émigrés fleeing the country’s increasing austerities.

Dalton’s impassioned singing style — as if Billie Holiday took up residence in an impecunious Southern misfit — has made fans out a range of contemporaries, from the art-rock auteur Nick Cave to the harpist Joanna Newsom.

We’re not talking public or academic institutions, but what any impecunious collector vainly covets — an English country-house library or what Byers calls a “bookwrapt” study like that of Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady.”

Among them is the sardonic confidant, St. Quentin; the down-at-the heels military man, Major Brutt; and the impecunious, high-living chancer, Eddie.