looker-on

When he arrived in Paris, in the seventeen-forties, at the age of thirty, he was a deracinated looker-on, struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion, and rejection provoked by a self-absorbed élite.

If you are to take Wagner at his word he was a mere looker-on in Dresden during what Bakounine contemptuously called "a petty insurrection."

It is much better and more humane than the whipping and spurring which is so grievous to a sensitive looker-on.

It is merely the plain narrative of a looker-on, who accompanied the expedition from the commencement of December 1867, when affairs at Zulla were at their worst, to the closing scene at Magdala.

The honest indignation of the apostles, the visible perturbation of the traitor, are each right in their place, and for the looker-on, but they are nothing to him.