Word: bassington
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...character called Reginald, who discoursed in a series of semiprecious mots: "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word." Another was Clovis Sangrail, a young man much given to the kind of "gorgeous hoax" that might scandalize a dull house party. Last came Comus Bassington, the hero-villain-victim of Saki's splendid novel The Unbearable Bassington, a tribute to lost youth that discovers deep sadness in the social shallows of Edwardian England...
There were three results. The first was brilliant: The Unbearable Bassington, published in 1912, so Saki could demonstrate that he could write a novel and at the same time pour ashes upon the society he had long been part of. Says Langguth: "It could be the cry of an outsider whose thin lips ache from 40 years of smiling." The second result was his second (and last) novel, When William Came, an unsuccessful but percipient fantasy written in early 1913, about what England would be like under German occupation, and how a flabby society full of jokesters, hucksters and aesthetes...
Ever since Saki's Colonel, in "The Unberable Bassington," first announced that the Bandicoot had been lost, together with the roc and the borogove, and even hinted that there might not be much point in looking for it, the perverse have been looking. What became of the Bandicoot? No one ever knew. Well, hardly anyone, but a student of biology, casting about through the caverns of Peabody Museum this week, came upon a curious bit of taxidermy. The label, like all Peabody labels, was in flower long before Saki's colonel, and it reads "Broad-Billed Bandicoot." Spurred...
| 1 |