Catch-22 vocabulary

In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty’s favour, I told him of “an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. [...]"

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

---

He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (Translated by Constance Garnett)