Please read it not as a coherent text, because it isn't, but a collection of separate sentences.
to bill as
On the move again in 1857 he ended up in Montreal, Canada, where he began to bill himself as a renowned doctor.
I think he discovered them first, engineering stories that billed him as a formidable candidate in the state where the first Democratic votes of the campaign would be registered in neighborhood caucuses.
to intimidate
Especially interesting was the ability of some bishops to organize groups of fanatically loyal monks in order to intimidate their enemies.
In 1977, the FBI raided the offices of the Church of Scientology, seeking evidence about “Operation Snow White,” the church’s official program designed to intimidate and malign its opponents, including government officials.
to forestall
Unquestionably, clandestine paramilitary organisations existed in the 1920s and 1930s, intended to forestall ‘Red’ revolution or social and economic reform agendas of the kind associated with Jack Lang in New South Wales and E. G. Theodore in Queensland.
In order to support his allies in Babylon and forestall a Persian invasion of Asia Minor, King Croesus of Lydia crossed the Halys River and captured Pteria in Cappadocia.
to proffer
By marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, Henry VII then proffered the essential palliative to those Yorkist defectors who had joined him against Richard in the first place.
In the minds of social scientists history could, at best, proffer factual data.
to abhor
Was this spectacle intended to make the Parisians abhor persecution, and loath the effusion of blood?
Pope Urban II, fearing the church would lose what little influence it had, and abhorring the results of continued infighting among the Christian nobility, sought a way to unite Christendom in a common cause.
quadruped
A quadruped has the advantage of considerable stability when it walks.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.
