Word: curmudgeon
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What makes Macdonald original, perhaps irreplaceable as a pan-critic (in both senses of "pan") is in fact a latent romanticism. More than his victims can appreciate, he is a genial curmudgeon, teetering on the very edge of hope. He growls partly to keep from being played for a sucker. Macdonald might even be called an American Bernard Shaw, if Shaw had written only prefaces or if Macdonald had written plays. Besides, that is to say, these marvelous little one-act monologues, featuring the persona he made of himself. ·Melvin Maddocks...
...Curmudgeon and New Christian Malcolm Muggeridge (see BOOKS), one of the speakers at the congress, was more direct. Muggeridge, a nondenominational believer who thinks that many Christians have sacrificed the spiritual message of the Gospel in pursuit of temporal liberation, spoke feelingly about the inevitable disappointments that follow upon "fantasies of power." As for setting up a rival organization, he told TIME bluntly, "Anything that does damage to the World Council of Churches is a step in the right direction...
...DeVoto always in such an uproar? Edmund Wilson once asked, genuinely puzzled. Part of the answer is that DeVoto-to use an almost obsolete word for an almost obsolete species -was a curmudgeon. It is Stegner's finest instinct that he does not try to make his curmudgeon correct-just very necessary...
Newport is an island. Theophilus North is Wilder's Tempest, a mock world, a playful world, made safe and orderly by kindly meddling. It would take a Caliban or a young curmudgeon to complain that it is a tempest in a teapot...
...himself spent the last six years of his life, unable to write, staring out of his window in Christiania. "Leave that to me," he snapped at a visitor who asked how he felt about God. And one day, when a nurse announced that he was feeling better, the old curmudgeon found the ultimate putdown. "On the contrary!" he said, and died. · Brad Darrach