Word: aphoristic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...critic, aphorist and editor of parts, Cyril Connolly is the latest fashion in bitter elegance in English letters, as his friend George Orwell is the latest fashion in common sense. Connolly's touch of Irish divination and curiosity has given him a greater range than other amateurs of the 18th Century manner. His published pieces yield the vivid image of an Old Etonian still alive and kicking amid the European rubble, somberly turning the pages of psychiatric journals, reaching for the odes of Horace, and composing, with a groan, clever paragraphs to keep his modern anguish under classic control...
...platitude honors, only rival to B. C. the biographer is B. C. the aphorist. Last week, in one 400-word column on how to be successful, he dropped one dozen mottoes, including "Pride prejudices . . . Conceit begets coldness . . . Selfishness shrivels sympathy . . . Almightiness kills admiration. . . ." He also cited Kettering, Owen Young, Willkie, Lincoln to prove that "radiators of happiness . . . multiply contracts as well as contacts...