Word: wittiest
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Gogarty, "wittiest man in Dublin, has a sharp tongue and a thin skin. Two months ago the famed surgeon-poet-Senator-wit collected ?100 libel damages from poor Irish Poet Patrick" Kavanagh. Immortalized in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as Malachi Mulligan, Gogarty declared that Joyce had perpetrated a gross libel. The Mulligan portrait, said its original, was a brutalized version showing only the bawdy side of his wit; Joyce had maliciously muted his subtler accomplishments, such as his poetry, his witty out-talking of Dublin's best talkers...
...rare Petite Messe Solennelle (Little Solemn Mass), which is neither little nor solemn. The Mass took almost two hours to perform, was full of the impish but not impious gaiety of Rossini's comic operas (Ceneventola, The Barber of Seville). Rossini, one of the laziest and wittiest of all composers, wrote his Solemn Mass in 1863 at the age of 71, called it his "last mortal sin," marked one passage Allegro Cristiano (quick but Christian), confessed he did not know whether it was "musique sacrée ou sacrée musique" (sacred or accursed music), made one tenor...
...Hill drawing room one Saturday afternoon in 1893 an awed young man was introduced in a loud voice to a tiny, asthmatic, homely oldster. The young man was Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, 29, recently made assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The old man was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wittiest man of his day, unofficial Boston poet laureate, last surviving petal of the literary flowering of New England. By the next autumn, feeling "like my own survivor," Dr. Holmes had died quietly at 85 in his armchair. It was their only meeting. But of the next New England literary generation...
...characters will eventually resolve itself. However, if it has often been told before, the story has rarely been told better. Richard Wallace's direction, Paul Osborn's screen play, Franz Waxman's score and the acting of precisely the right cast combine to make it the wittiest and most civilized cinema comedy of the year. Good sequence: Colonel Carleton and his son, whose morning diversion is watching excavations, discussing Capital and Labor while they wait for the noon whistle to blow so that they can go to lunch...
...novels of Henry de Montherlant are characterized by a strange air of scatterbrained earnestness. One of the wittiest of modern French writers, he gets his effects, like an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist, by looking in the wrong direction, delivering little sermons about this and that, suddenly popping out with his tricks already worked. Because of this stealthy way of sneaking up on a story, his characters sometimes seem less like human beings than like rabbits pulled out of a hat, blinking uncomfortably at their sudden appearance...