Word: waspish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most detailed biography of Cheever for some years to come. Grudging attention must be paid by all those who value Cheever and his work. But devotees can also look forward to the scheduled publications later this year of the author's collected letters and previously uncollected stories. Cheever's waspish, beguiling voice has clearly not had its last word...
...self-portrait that Wilson provides is hardly flattering -- he often appears waspish, rude, disagreeable -- but he makes up for it to some extent by being fully aware of his faults. At one point he reminds himself: "Don't talk all the time. It is an error to suppose that other people can have nothing interesting to say." At another, while dining in a Parisian cafe with his fourth wife, Elena, he sees himself in a wall mirror and "was horrified at the contrast between my big-bellied person and my red and swollen face, with a not too pleasant expression...
...love, served up a sexual set-to whose rapier eloquence has inspired just about every British playwright of manners from Congreve to Coward and beyond. While Hero and Claudio played out their fustian collision of chivalry and jealousy at center court, Beatrice and Benedick stood on the sidelines, exchanged waspish badinage and transformed supporting roles into star turns. This time around, Sinead Cusack (who need no longer be known only as Mrs. Jeremy Irons) makes Beatrice every inch the lady of hide-pendent mind. Derek Jacobi's Benedick begins abubble with adolescent spirits, sighing and whinnying like a high...
...awkward go-getter whose own glory days are long past-and a bittersweet romance flutters through and out of Laura's life. Amanda, Laura and Tom (Laura's brother and the play's narrator) may be fated to melancholy, but they survive on a diet of waspish barbs and mock-courtly wit. This requiem for decayed ideals is also a giddy Irish wake...
...movie, which is about as simple as they come, chronicles the summer vacation of a quintessentially WASPish upper-crust suburban Chicago family which--as sure as there is an alligator on Chevy's pink Polo shirt--runs amok...