Word: basil
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...Market Wise, with Basil James up: the 56th annual Suburban Handicap; defeating famed Whirlaway by three lengths; before a Memorial Day crowd of 52,000; at New York's Belmont Park. The day's pari-mutuel handle was $2,176,071, a world's record for one day's racetrack betting...
Waugh's hero ghost is ratlike, inexorably likable Basil Seal, the flower of British adventurousness degraded to magenta.* War draws him and his fellow ghosts into one of those ornamental tourniquet-and-candy- box knots which only Waugh knows how to tie. But Waugh's dross and gloss should deceive nobody for long; he has become one of the most deadly serious moralists of his generation. Every one of his novels had its masked importance. History helps make Put Out More Flags his most important book...
...whittling off the heads of domestic animals; and little Marlene, who liked to finish off the dogs' supper plates and who promptly restored all she ate all over the floors. There they stood, "one leering, one lowering, and one drooling," a frightful triptych, the terror of the countryside. Basil found inspired use for them. Assuming power as billeting officer, he visited them upon another British quintessence: the middleaged, music-loving, rock-gardening, genteel, post-Pre-Raphaelite people who made up the Garden Party Only list in sister Barbara's address book. On these Basil cleaned...
This time Basil was ruthless. He got into the Ministry of Information and offered to betray "some very dangerous Communists" he knew, such as "the woman Green." Crooked Colonel Plum made him a second lieutenant ("There's a lot to be said for a uniform . ... best possible disguise for a man of intelligence") and said, "Catch a Fascist for me and I'll think about making you a Captain of Marines." Ambrose's magazine and Poppet's Marxed-up reflex to it furnished Basil with his Fascist. His betrayal of Ambrose is a piece of murderous...
...Alastair Trumpington breathlessly tells his pregnant wife. "D'you mind very much if I accept?" "No, darling, I couldn't keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn't. I see that." It is not quite easy to believe in the Basil of the epilogue who says, "There's only one serious occupation for a chap now, that's killing Germans," good as he might well be at the job. But Waugh's tag line brings every page of the book into razor focus...