Word: waspish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Gluck paid a courtesy call on Ceylon's Education Minister, waspish Left-Winger Wijayananda Dahanayake. Gluck had practiced pronouncing the Education Minister's name until he had it down cold. But Minister Dahanayake's secretary had somehow forgotten to remind his boss of the appointment...
Archaic Britons. Meantime still another ad began appearing in newspapers in U.S. cities: "Student of Anglo-American relations is anxious to know what qualities are most disliked in the British . . ." It proved to be the work of the London Daily Mirror's waspish Columnist Cassandra (William Connor), who could hardly wait to return from his vacation to see what the postman had brought. One of the papers carrying his ad, the Washington Post and Times Herald, published its own reply: "The British are archaic. They cling to worn-out practices. They profess to see virtue in . . . training for public...
While building Punch into its readable and financially hale condition circ. (132,000), Muggeridge has also built Muggeridge into a major TV personality. As commentator and interviewer on the BBC (a favorite Punch target), he treats sentimentality, mediocrity and many a sacred cow with waspish wit, which, coupled with his upper-crust air, has made the popular press bill him as "the man you love to hate." Muggeridge will go on being fascinatingly hateful on TV, plans a novel and a biography of George (1984) Orwell. At Punch, where Muggeridge's brisk ways produced some sparks as well...
...date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture vultures and modern art ("Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood"). For the rest, Pnin's centripetal personality holds this novel together, and his centrifugal English keeps the laughs flying...
...scandalous. It has already sold 500,000 copies in Italy (where it was banned) and in France. It is not the first among the nine novels by sometime French Diplomat Peyrefitte to enjoy a popular, scandalous and critical success (Diplomatic Conclusions drew indignant disclaimers from the French Foreign Office). Waspish Author Peyrefitte writes like a countryman of Rabelais and Voltaire, but in the U.S., where there is no comparable tradition of anticlerical literature, he is likely to shock more than to entertain...