Word: iconoclastic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...possible "in the early twenties . . . to hire the recording secretary of the Classical High School debating society-a man whose mordant irony reminded his auditors of Disraeli and Brann the Iconoclast, although he had scarcely turned 16 -to sift your ashes and beat your carpets at 30? an hour. Even I find it almost too fantastic to credit, and, mind you, I was the recording secretary...
...once or twice, is even funny in itself. But the humor of the dialogue and the situations is what tells, and it is forced, hoary, and sometimes private. It seems to depend sololy on the type of wit referred to in the first sentence: the humor of the iconoclast. Now, there's no one who enjoys more than I the prospect of Orphan Annie getting her due, which, in this instance, comes in being taken advantage of by some drunken Yaleman (and later handed over, a hopeless reprobate, to the making of Li'l Abner), but the initial...
...answer for juvenile delinquency, the high divorce rate, national psychoses such as Naziism and "iron curtains." He presents his answers, as usual, in ups & downs of personal sharpness and pseudo-scientific bombast, glib epigrams and gassy notions, often pungent and more often appallingly slipshod prose. At his best, Iconoclast Wylie pinpricks as sharply as H. L. Mencken ; at his worst, he is as full of unenlightening heat as Westbrook Pegler...
Against the background of the vivid, swirling gaiety of Moliere's and d'Artagnan's France, Cyrano is the manipulated story of a rapier-wielding, poetry-spouting wit who lets his nose get in the way of his love affairs. An iconoclast, embattled against a pedantic society, he sweeps all before him except the final prize, the ivory-fair Roxane. His winning love speeches he puts into the mouth of a handsome dolt, for her sake. The motif is noble, yet it shrinks to the simple moral that it takes more than a sharp tongue, a sharper sword...
...contending for our souls." A vigorous anti-imperialist (as a youth, he served in the Burma police), he has the courage to affirm that an imperialist like Rudyard Kipling is likely to speak more sanely about imperial affairs than are his liberal critics. Finally, while remaining a skeptical iconoclast, Orwell can insist that "high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic...