Word: snobs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fallen Among Fabians. As Shaw tells it, his socialist faith began as a personal thing - a bitterness against a class system that he felt at the patched seat of his pants. He writes of his Dublin boyhood as that of "a penniless snob." But if his poverty denied him the class privilege of a university education, it gave him great freedom of mind. He could be depended upon to rush in where pedants feared to tread. At the drop of a bourgeois top hat, he would discourse on Moses or municipal drains, on Marx or Michelangelo. Browbeating the Church...
Vidal thinks of himself as a liberal-or, as he prefers to put it, a "maverick lemming." In fact, he is more nearly a conservative, with a taste for tradition in literature and privilege in life. He conveys the oddly patrician appeal of an elegant and unabashed snob and he has the patrician's special toughness...
Even as a poet's poet, though, Pushkin is still very special and-in translation-frustrating. His verse is elusively simple, unadorned by such easily translatable characteristics as splashy imagery or intellectual abstractions. Its strength lies rather in subtly suggestive tones and rhythms. No less a language snob and stylist than Vladimir Nabokov labored on and off for almost a decade to translate Pushkin's acknowledged masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's rendering of this romantic (and mock romantic) panorama of Russian society was brilliant; yet even he decided to settle for strict literalism rather...
...derision of U.S. movie moguls and their rampant commercialism, Pauline Kael is not an art-house snob. She prefers genuine American kitsch, if it has style and verve, to such avant-garde films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Red Desert and Last Year at Marienbad ("the snow job in the ice palace"). Among her favorite directors are John Frankenheimer and Orson Welles, who provide "clean, fast pacing without the fancy stuff. It goes better with our national rhythm." A onetime experimental moviemaker in San Francisco, where she grew up and attended the University of California at Berkeley, she finds today...
...chance to show their stuff under his skeptical gaze. Drawing from Gustave le Bon's 1895 book The Crowd, he views the investing public as a highly volatile and irrational mass mind that usually overreacts and does the wrong thing. Yet Smith/Goodman is neither dogmatist nor snob, as evidenced by his parody of Kipling: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you haven't heard the news...