Word: gnomic
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...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...
...parents say against him, dreads her leaving, but seems so helpless in doing anything about it that he gives the impression of being a little feebleminded. Still stranger are their two children-round-faced, mindless, cheerful little Sophie; contemplative, mature, intuitive little Armand, who occasionally gives voice to gnomic philosophy, sees visions, hopes to be a monk. Enduring insults because of her dark skin, money troubles and sickness with the children, Renée gets this pair across France while her husband is transferred to a post still deeper in the tropics...