Word: blimpishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Diplomat moves airily about from Moscow to Iran to London, casually drags in Stalin, Vishinsky and Molotov as if they were handy stage extras, uses embassies and the halls of Parliament as if they were interchangeable stage props, Lord Essex, half Blimpish charlatan, half rhesterfieldian dandy, is too close to caricature to convince even a reader of Pravda. MacGregor is too churlish, too slow-witted to be anyone's hero, let alone that of a sharp gal-of-all-embassies like Kathy Clive. Whatever a reader's politics, he may well be puzzled by the publisher...
...Despite Blimpish resistance in the civil service, MacDonald is pushing educational and economic plans (e.g., more village schools and a five-year plan to integrate rubber-rich Malaya's lopsided economy). He has had notable results in bringing together the federation's rival Chinese (1,884,534) and Malay (2,427,834) population, mainly through the Communities Liaison Committee, in which leaders of both peoples talk over common problems of citizenship and economic opportunity...
...Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place...
...Labor government had been content to let Colonial Office veterans run the unliquidated portions of the empire. Whenever it tried to make socialists shoulder the white man's burden, something had gone wrong. Out under the never-setting sun, one of the socialist governors turned more blimpish than Colonel Blimp. Another took his socialist mission a bit too seriously. The latter was Oliver Ridsdale, Earl Baldwin, the socialist son of the late Stanley Baldwin...
Quartet ends with The Colonel's Lady, an exhilarating snifter of Maugham's best vintage. It describes the troubles of a Blimpish colonel and his mousy, neglected wife whose little volume of passionate love poems suddenly becomes a nationwide bestseller. Cecil Parker and Nora Swinburne are just right in the leading roles, and the camera makes some telling, acidulous comments on club-chair Berties and Mayfair literati...