Word: aldington
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...ROMANCE OF CASANOVA (344 pp.) -Richard Aldington-Duell, Sloan & Pearce...
...Duke is a tribute. The 29th book of Richard Aldington, 51, and his best, it is to the vast library of material on Wellington what Reader's Digest is to the accumulation of writing in U.S. magazines - an expert job of condensation and synthesis, inspired when its source materials are inspired, slowgoing when the mass of detail is incorporated at the expense of color and warmth. The Duke is also salted with the Tory aphorisms of a simple man who did not know that what he said was wisdom...
Total Symmetry. There was an absolute symmetry in Wellington's political, social and military theory. Author Aldington calls him a world policeman. This is Aldington's way of acknowledging the fact that in Wellington, as in Napoleon, political theory and military strategy were inseparable. The clarity of the Duke's political vision, his mere knowledge of what kind of a world he wanted to gain, preserve and extend determined his actions as directly as the hills and the forts, the number of his troops and his opponents'. The difference was that Napoleon's achievements...
...moods of frightful despair after fighting, Wellington's will ebbed and sickened. He suffered when supplies were withheld from him, his dispatches were betrayed to the enemy, his promotion was "protracted so studiously" that it became a "scandal," and from the intrigues against him so persistent that Aldington has no explanation for them beyond this-that "such intrigues succeed partly because the ordinary men and women fighting, suffering, and paying for a war cannot believe them possible." He was superseded again & again-sensationally after Vimiero, when he was in the midst of a brilliant campaign at the very moment...
...Poison on the Pen. Author Aldington inherited that spirit: his bitter anti-war autobiographical novels (Death of a Hero, Roads to Glory) were contributions to it. And though he condemns it in The Duke its lingering traces poison his biography with a wit which seems studied and dutiful, a shamefacedness before an unequivocal salute to a great man, and a hesitancy in striking out the dull gossip and malice. Only in his last chapters does Richard Aldington drop the irrelevancies of sophisticated comment and let himself go in praise of the "distant but steady beacon of common sense" whose simple...