Word: curmudgeon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Frederick George ("Peckham") Banbury, First Baron Banbury of Southam, 85, famed old parliamentary curmudgeon; at Highworth, Wiltshire, England. A Tory diehard, who boasted that his home was illuminated only by candles, he blocked admittance of peeresses to the House of Lords lest the body "lose dignity to secure efficiency...
...though he has thought it better to tone down the broad King's English of the day. The hero, a grocer's son turned soldier, comes back to his paternal home on London Bridge after a ten-year absence, to find his betrothed wed to an old curmudgeon, to get himself hopelessly entangled with his best friend's fiancée. Luckily for all Jack Cade's rebellion puts a quietus on these amorous monkeyshines, and the story ends in a grand blaze of street-fighting, with London Bridge tottering on its old foundations...
Grandpa Storr is the central figure of The Stranger's Return. A hard-fibred, eloquent curmudgeon of nearly 90, he entertains himself by abusing the pasty-faced riff-raff of his family-a nephew's widow, a stepdaughter, her husband-who are his pensioners at Storrhaven while they wait for him to die. When Louise (Miriam Hopkins), the daughter of Grandpa Storr's oldest son, arrives at Storrhaven, the old man gets a new interest in life-showing her that she belongs, not in New York where she has been married and divorced, but on the ancestral...
...Author Frederick Lonsdale's play by hammering them with irrelevant elaborations. His cast-with the exception of Gertrude Lawrence-does likewise. Hugh Wakefield delivers parlor witticisms with a smile more vehement than that of the late Theodore Roosevelt. He is Lord Grenham, an ill-behaved but jolly curmudgeon whose experience in getting himself out of romantic scrapes stands him in good stead when he is trying to right things between his son and daughter-in-law. In addition to poor casting-a defect common to British cinemas because the best British actors are either on the stage...
...wife's attempts to make him a social celebrity, her flirtations to arouse his jealousy. The novel tells of two Austro-Polish war-prisoners (Stanislaw, his friend Felix) sent to a Turkestan farm to help with the crops. The farm is owned and managed by no rustic curmudgeon but by a Polish girl, pretty and strong-willed Marusia. The prisoners spend pleasant months there, become members of a congenial family. Marusia falls in love with Stanislaw: it works both ways; before he can say knife he is back in the prison camp again, for Marusia has jealous and watchful...