Word: cyrill
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This Jonah was no theoretician. He was, wrote old School Friend Cyril Connolly recently, "a political animal [who] could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry." Though Orwell was a socialist, the metaphysical system underlying Marxian socialism meant nothing to him, and he had an empirical Englishman's distrust of other philosophical abstractions; to him, the existentialist Sartre was a windbag. But he also held an immense advantage over English intellectuals in politics who, by comparison, seem like dishonest children...
...life, when he was dying of TB, he characteristically decided to treat it on a fog-swept island off Scotland's west coast. Evelyn Waugh visited him on his deathbed, and the reactionary Catholic gourmet saw a rare quality in the socialist agnostic puritan. To Cyril Connolly, Waugh solemnly said: "He is very near to God." Told of this, Orwell sniffed: "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions...
...state of being, a translation from the unconscious. In The Party, Pinter is governed once again by his vision of woman as the sexual aggressor. The secretary is pallidly but visibly related to the praying-mantis wife in The Homecoming. The character of Sisson was almost perfectly described by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave when he wrote: "A puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness, the more difficulty he has in finding a woman who is brave enough to simulate...
...When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...
...cars as favors to a dozen dinner guests. We all have our pet charities, and some of us even have crusades for example, H. L. Hunt, the Texas oil billionaire, spends millions on propaganda against assorted people whom he regards as Red subversives. Then in Britain, there's Sir Cyril Black, the rich Tory MP, who is dedicated to protecting the "moral" working class from dirty books. As he sees it, "the intelligentsia are the ones who are pulling down the temple...