Word: highbrow
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...Mary McCarthy's far-from-secret weapon is to write her enemies-and friends-into her books. Despite her demurrers, the game of "spot-the-model" goes on. Experts in this game can tell that Taub in The Oasis is really the editor of a certain highbrow magazine; another highbrow editor (his journal is now defunct) won his McCarthy Purple Heart as Macdougal Macdermott in the same book, but both remain good and gallant friends of their satirist...
Author Goyen is nettled when people confuse him with the lunatic fringe of highbrow Dixie. He insists he is a true Texan whose "themes . . . have no affinity with the eccentricities of Southern personality or Gothic bizarreries." He has never lived in the Deep Southern states. "only passed through them on a train." Just the same, so susceptible an author should not take such a risk again...
...French critical circles, the cowboy has long been regarded with deep solemnity. Many a longhaired Frenchman believes that the western film is Hollywood's finest achievement, a kind of national folklore in the making. In a flood of recently published books and articles, Europe's highbrow critics have been soberly examining the western and discovering in it virtues and complexities which even its most loyal fans never suspected it possessed...
Personal Life: Youngest of six children, Heinrich von Brentano devoted many years of his life to the care of his widowed mother; a confirmed bachelor whose hobbies are collecting silver and old furniture for his apartments in Darmstadt and Bonn, he is a connoisseur of wines and highbrow conversation, an admirer of Thomas Mann. Says he of cocktail parties: "When I have to go to any of them. I tell my chauffeur not to switch off the gas, for I'll be back in a few minutes." A hater of demagogy, and himself a poor orator...
...Every highbrow worth his martini nowadays has enough psychoanalytical know-how to trace his best friend's fallen arches back to infantile stresses and strains or to see homicidal tendencies merely as the mask of a basically shy, reticent character. Now, thanks to the appearance of this book, any lowbrow can also learn to take the first fumbling steps towards a total misunderstanding of human nature...