Word: donnish
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...Although he still hasn't revealed his real name (Jiang is a pseudonym), the obligation to promote Wolf Totem means that these days Jiang will reveal previously guarded details of his life and the creation of his unlikely best seller - and they make it clear that behind the slightly donnish exterior, he has lived with the same willful spirit as the wolves he writes about. He has, for instance, been arrested five times for being a "counterrevolutionary," experiencing beatings and five years in prison (the last stint for leading a group of students to the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen...
...election was a disaster for Labor, which suffered its most stinging defeat since 1918. Michael Foot, 69, the donnish, white-haired historian and critic who would have become Prime Minister had Labor won, held on to his parliamentary seat at Blaenau Gwent in Wales, but is expected to resign soon as Labor's leader...
...Perhaps reflecting his creator's donnish temperament, Inspector Chen is somewhat ambivalent about the door-knocking and petty politicking that go along with police work. In the course of his investigations, Qiu's hero frequently cites literary theory or quotes Tang dynasty poetry. Chen is less a cop moonlighting as a poet than a poet daylighting...
...show, he also claims to have done so believing that "the first flush" of Walcott's inspiration had gone, and that the poet "was now marking time." Walcott's borrowing of Western European literary forms is peevishly dismissed as "falsifying" and his later career pooh-poohed with a donnish sneer: "A wonderful new black voice in the United States ... called out from the islands to teach in American universities...
...watching its hero jump to false conclusions about the past were the entire point of The Plato Papers, the book would amount to an amusing but decidedly donnish diversion. And for many readers, that would be quite good enough. Plato's attempts to define old words are instructively wrongheaded: "rock music: the sound of old stones"; "telepathy: the suffering caused by 'television...