Word: flitting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...devilishly attractive Henri (Feodor Atkine). Pierre runs after Marion while she runs after Henri who in turn runs after the local candy seller Louissette (Rosette). A series of confusions sprout. Henri does not want commitments, preferring women who will give into his needs for the moment and then flit out of his life. Marion desires love, true love, a love that will make her soul "burn forever...
Vidalia (pop. 12,500) is in a land of griddle-flat fields frying in the sun, above which flit innumerable gnats. Newcomers reveal their newness by slapping at the gnats. Natives just shrug and blow them away. It is a region in which people, upon taking leave of one another, say either "Better come go with us" or "Stay with us"-no matter whether the plural applies. The stranger who says "O.K." to either proposition is regarded...
...excessive descriptive detail is especially disturbing because it complements an absence of any substantive character development. Other figures flit in and out of the novel without any identity of their own. They are props-roadmarker measuring the progress of Sarah's intellectual, journalistic and sexual development. Carolee, a Radcliffe student "with a delicate bone structure and the strength of a bull," exists almost exclusively to feed Sarah appropriate feminist readings and political views...
Writers, artists and beauties flit through Quennell's pages like guests at one of Lady Ottoline Morrell's parties. Here is George Orwell, with his face of "haggard nobility"; Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, "clever, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned, close-lipped"; and Rose Macaulay, telling a friend at the end of her life, "I think I'm going to die in a fortnight. When are you pushing off?" Quennell writes affectionately of Artist Augustus John, with his gypsy ways and tribe of illegitimate children; John was immensely popular in his heyday, yet "had nothing of the fatuous outward...
...been on-topic, an achingly serious match that is less an extracurricular pastime than a kind of secular self-mortification. On-topic debaters all over the country argue a single consequential issue for a year. Off-topic debaters, who suddenly outnumber the on-topic traditionalists on most Northeast campuses, flit from one ephemeral subject to another every hour or so, allowing themselves only ten minutes to muster each case. Success at on-topic demands fetishistic research, note cards by the hundred gross and the rhetorical felicity of an armored truck. Off-topic debate, by contrast, is meant...