Word: ironist
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Citation: "Skilled novelist of manners, an ironist who inspires laughter with a sting, he has made an imaginary character a byword on countless lips...
...hero and the villain of biology, have also been starred in a lot of badly overwritten fiction. In a new first novel, The Trouble of One House, the old antagonists are presented with exact good taste. In Novelist Breudan Gill, moreover, readers are presented with a fine new ironist...
Love, says Ironist Gill, is not just the sweet mystery of life; it is a tremendous natural force that can shatter people who resist it. And people who truly know how to love can be dreadful nuisances in a world of people...
Slowly it grows on the reader that Stendhal, like a careful appraiser, is quietly scraping a little surface off everyone in sight, revealing the true metal beneath. Yet as the book advances, Stendhal is more than a carping social critic. He is an ironist; and above all he is a novelist using irony to tell a love story, which is both a tragic and a comic...
Sheppey (well played by Edmund Gwenn) is a perky London barber who wins ?8,500 in a sweepstakes, decides to give his money to the poor, begins by bringing home a streetwalker and a thief. From there on the cynic and ironist in Maugham have a field day. Sheppey, his family feels sure, must be off his chump. The harlot and the thief, bored stiff by the good life, scamper back to the bad one. For a final joker, Maugham shows that the exemplary Sheppey really is sick: he has been having visions of a strange woman, who turns...