Word: antically
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Since Aldous Huxley wrote Antic Hay in 1923, fair-minded U. S. readers may have felt that the English upper classes were getting a raw deal in modern English fiction. The works of Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank and lesser observers of the upperworld contain few characters above the rank of a knight or above the ?5,000-a-year income level who are untouched by insipidity, depravity, or both. This week the far less satiric Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring) contributed another long, episodic novel depicting some unsavory doings among the best people. Since Recapture the MOON...
...Next morning at 10:35 a. m., while his brother Ira watched over him, George Gershwin died. Serious musicians joined pluggers and crooners to mourn the 38-year-old composer who had made the world sing his songs and who never, even in his most pretentious work, disdained the antic, impertinent data he had picked up in Tin Pan Alley...
...published his first book, The Burning Wheel, a volume of poems. After the War he became an art, music and dramatic critic, was on the staff of London House and Garden when, in 1921, he published his first novel, Crome Yellow. The dominant note of that book, as of Antic Hay and Those Barren Leaves which followed it, was one of unamiable cynicism over the prevailing moods and purposeless behavior of post-War English intellectuals. In Huxley's characters purpose was always identified with hypocrisy, devotion to any ideal with ineffectuality or self-deception. Between long highbrow talks, usually...
...authors used as illustrations. The book is almost worth owning for Henry Lamb's remarkable portrait of Strachey. On the other hand, there is much unaccountable carelessness in the text; the name of the pilgrim ship in "Lord Jim" is the "Patna," not the "Patria;" the protagonist of "Antic Hay" is Gumbril, not Gombauld; D. H. Lawrence died and was buried at Vence, in the South of France, not at Venice...
...Petruchio and his truculent bride Katharine is interrupted from time to time while tumblers, a tenor, a troupe of midgets take the stage. Within the play itself, the Lunts have felt free to bring in any amount of extraneous horseplay that might add freshness and fun to their antic. Thus, as plain Kate, bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst, Miss Fontanne stalks about in a torn white gown with hair in her eyes, kicks people in the fundament, hurls bedding out a second-story window, rides a fake horse makes one exit seated backward on a donkey. Whereas most...