Word: wittingly
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...Edward ("Eddie") Marsh knows as many such stories as there were incredible characters in preWar, bilingual British society. In A Number of People he strings them along on the bright, thin thread of his own life story with all the wit, charm, and intimate malice of a puckish British Proust. Unlike Proust, Marsh seldom sees through his irascible, Latinizing, fox-hunting dukes and musical, horsey, but absent-minded duchesses, although their snobbishness often makes him wince...
...superior to those of Stephen Crane; the humor, bewilderment and passion of Miss Lillie make Hawthorne's and Cooper's damsels seem moral abstractions. Although, in its 466 pages, the book sometimes seems labored, and antiquated asides slow down its fast story, De Forest's wit picks it up, springs out in the plain talk of soldiers, his comments on the appallingly dull conversations of people in love, on the mores of the Puritan North and the Cavalier South. Says Yale's Professor Gordon S. Haight, who believes that De Forest's characters are unsurpassed...
...Pioneer, the Golden Era, the Overland Monthly, the Californian were such resourceful amateurs as Sam Brannon, wildcat Mormon leader who got rich collecting tithes from gold prospectors; Ferdinand C. Ewer, tall, goateed, atheist Harvardman who later became an Episcopal rector; Charles Henry Webb, lisping, redheaded ex-sailor and miner, wit and lady-killer, who fled to California to escape the Civil War. (In the second year of the war, 100,000 army deserters and pacifists rolled into California. Among them was a slouchy ex-river pilot named Samuel Clemens...
...playwright and screen writer, Samson Raphaelson is as good as they come. His light comedies (The Jazz Singer, Young Love, Accent on Youth) not only packed them in, critics liked them too, praised their deftness, wit, freshness. But Broadway and Hollywood are not Parnassus. Skylark, a fluffy first novel originally written as a play (serialized in the Satevepost as Streamlined Heart), last week proved that Samson Raphaelson's stuff is better on boards than in them...
...carbon copy, not a sequel, yet not entirely a fresh and uninfluenced cinema, Daughters Courageous has a coltish, unaffected charm, considerable wit, an ill-concealed admiration for its two picaresque but impossible male mainstays. Not calculated to stir up too much emotion, one scene in it will nevertheless bring goose-pimples to many a tough-bearded male. The scene: the girls, barbering their stepfather-elect, shaving downwards over his Adam's apple...