Word: dourest
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...ENVY, writes Novelist Angus (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes) Wilson, is perhaps the dourest of sins, since "it knows no gratification save endless self-torment." Wilson finds the Green Evil everywhere, and suggests it is becoming more prevalent as examinations, from college boards to corporate psychological tests, determine who is up and who is down in life. Writers and actors are notoriously liable to envy and "ambitious clergymen, service officers and shop stewards appear to suffer most." But perhaps the most obnoxious form of the sin today is Western Europe's pervasive anti-Americanism. "There are grievances against America which deserve...
...from the bustle and night life of the big cities, The Netherlands is still dotted with some of the world's dourest Calvinist communities. Among its grimmest is the former islet of Urk (pop. 5,500), a fishing village on the Zuider Zee. On Sundays, Urkers still separate their hens from the roosters, turn their paintings to the wall, read only one book (the Bible), take only one processional walk (to church). Doing anything else is sinful. For years life in Urk was pretty routine, and the town constable's daily report invariably read: "Nothing has happened." That...
...aggressively misanthropic 24-year-old sergeant, and the dourest of Scots, Todd moves into a ward of recovering wounded and immediately gets the doting treatment of a popularity contest winner. What he does not know, and what his wardmates do know, is that he has only a few weeks to live. Hotly spurned and colorfully insulted, his fellow patients- an American, an Australian, a New Zealander, an Englishman and an African Basuto-find their sympathy giving way to acute dislike...
...Robert Graves, brilliant, 49-year-old veteran of 60 volumes of fiction, poetry and biography, has given Poet Milton a drubbing-on the same scanty evidence. His new novel, Wife to Mr. Milton, is an icy, wife's-eye-view of the Puritan Revolution's dourest man and greatest poet, set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. It is based on Marie's "secret diary" (which exists only in Author Graves's imagination), plus Graves's solid knowledge of Milton's life & times...
...bitten songs of the anthracite regions, were published. Author of the collection,† George Korson, a former newspaper reporter of Pottsville, Pa., had been hunting and writing down mine songs for some 14 years. Bristling with disasters, explosions, strikes and brawls, Korson's book makes one of the dourest proletarian records ever to come out of the drabbest of U. S. industrial areas...