He (or she) would be pro-active, approachable, knowledgeable and good company for journalists, without being sycophantic to them.

ECONOMIST: European politics

He was just trying to demonstrate that his sycophantic courtiers were foolish.

ECONOMIST: Letters

Last week a public television channel broadcast a laughably sycophantic interview with Mr Schmitt, while he was still attempting to cling to office.

ECONOMIST: Hungarian politics

Hence his venomous anger at postwar England's "sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous" upper middle classes, among whom the right accent was far more valuable than a high IQ.

WSJ: Look Back in Anger | Still Angry After All These Years | Theater Review by Terry Teachout

Sycophantic behavior tends to rule Seventh Art ceremonies.

FORBES: Spotlight On Bernard Henri-L��vy's Le Prix Saint-Germain, Paris

"Bruce Shelly, codesigner of Sid Meier's Civilization , is involved in this project, so expect remarkable things from Age of Empires later this year, " babbles a sycophantic quote from Canada Computes on Microsoft's web page.

FORBES: Sid Meier

The amoral Duke is a Sinatra-esque crooner with his own casino and posse of violent henchman (he sings his anthem, "Questa o quella, " with a microphone prop to a sycophantic crowd of dudes and showgirls).

WSJ: School for Scandal

We all led comfortable lives because of Jordan: Me, all the sycophantic TV guys and writers in Chicago, everyone who worked at NBC in the '90s, everyone who played against him and who wrote about him.

CNN: Jordan at 50: A celebration of ruthlessness

Steinheimer believes that the decline of the studios' power, combined with Taylor's colourful personal life, created a new, more cutting, and less sycophantic style of mainstream media coverage of celebrities - moving towards today's tabloid press.

BBC: How Elizabeth Taylor redefined celebrity