Word: gnomic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Read this series of short stories and cringe in terror as a rusty poker turns into a man, into a prince, into a male member, into a gnomic lusting man-beast, revealing the subconscious fantasies of two invented sisters...
...when one of the voices belongs to Comedienne Nancy Walker-solid and scrappy as ever, with her hair dyed firehouse red-the incongruity is almost painful. The play's central character, a mysterious psychiatrist called Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, who is given to gin-and-water and gnomic observations, is played by Sydney Walker with a kind of arch exaggeration that would surely prove more off-putting than compelling to the delicate souls he is out to snare...
...Such gnomic utterances, and the auric mysteries of the international monetary system, suddenly make the money game more fun to read about than play. Perhaps it is just as well...
Throughout, Stacton sacrifices story for gnomic utterance. He is often witty and pithy, as when he throws knives at such favorite targets as Richelieu (and De Gaulle): "Perfumes are best used to cover up the stinks of cunning. La Gloire de France is a perfume." He is sometimes eccentrically decorative, as when he fondles a favorite word (panache, chryselephantine) or interpolates an essay on ancient music or a sermon on international law. However entertaining, the devices are finally irrelevant and intrusive. Their cumulative effect is as pointless as a sword swallower who decides to eat the hilt first because...
...doughty little Englishwoman known as Bryher-in 1920 she changed her name from Winifred Ellerman-lives in Switzerland, where she has written a series of brisk, gnomic historical novels (Roman Wall, Ruari). Bryher seems to have had a full life of missed opportunities. She is the daughter and sister of millionaires...