Word: effortless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...last novel is as simple and unpretentious as anything he has ever written. Catalina is no masterpiece; it is merely a disarming little story laid in Spain during the Inquisition and written in a grave and effortless style modeled on the old chronicles, and sometimes edging over into a bland and amusing parody of them. The story concerns an extraordinary occurrence in the town of Castel Rodriguez: a girl named Catalina Perez, comely, virtuous and 16 years old, who has been trampled by a bull and crippled so that she can walk only with a crutch, reports that the Virgin...
...effortless sprint of Waugh's prose discovered a new region of perverse innocence unshadowed by any moral concepts whatever, it was clear that a new master of English satire had emerged...
Peristaltic Revulsion. In one degree or another, much of his work is an expression of loathing-a peristaltic revulsion of the soul. Waugh grasps at all outward forms-rank, ceremonies, cuisine, evocations of the architecture of once lovely and stately houses-to arrest the effortless slide of the old world into the muck of modernity. Brideshead is such an evocation...
...distinguished primarily for simple realism, a forthright, almost childlike honesty, a command of ordinary speech, a cool and effortless narrative style, quickened here & there with a mild, understated humor. The battle scenes are so vivid as to suggest Tolstoy's War and Peace, the common soldiers as clearly visualized as Tolstoy's peasants. Unlike Tolstoy's masterpiece, it is all war, not only in the sense that there are no scenes of peaceful life poised against the scenes of war, but in the sense that a knowledge of the meaning of peace is absent from the psychology...
Some information is more assimilable than other information. Facts, as Mark Twain noted, can be presented in such a way that they merely create "confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought." The reader's digestion of news will never be "effortless." TIME, however, tries to sift, sort, condense and explain the news by this simple standard: How much effort can an ordinarily educated and intelligent man or woman be expected to use in understanding this story? It's no use saying that 80 million Americans ought to have a thorough grasp of physics...