Word: leech
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Condon's 15th novel is a brittle comedy of bad manners. His prince is a dissolute leech on the public treasury who agrees to marry his German cousin only because Parliament will then begin to cover his royal debts. After meeting his intended, the prince whines that he is "going to have to live with that smelly thing for the rest of my life." In a characteristic gesture, he appoints his current mistress as Caroline's lady of the bedchamber. For her part, Caroline quickly takes the cut of the prince's jib and calls...
...almost ready to chalk the entire idea by Thanksgiving of his sophomore year, right after he Ken Nortoned some walking Walabbee from Milton in the jaw for snickering when he asked Paco to pass the Fritos at a party. Right then he realized he was a leech, like the guy in the Popeye cartoon who would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and who everybody knew was never even going to have enough money to pay for the relish. But still he was learning, he was watching these people, watching how they dressed and how they talked...
...makes tentative advances to Talia Shire? Who can fail to be moved when, suddenly, he is given a shot at the title and must, all unaided, fend off the usual unsavory types (low journalists, exploitative managers, old friends looking for a piece of the action) who try to leech on to him? He develops a winning shrewdness about them-and himself-that blends engagingly with his natural compassion. By film's end the 30-year-old boy has become...
...such pieces as The Prophet's Song. Words emerge with a cut-glass clarity that is rare in rock. Unfortunately, Queen's lyrics are not the stuff of sonnets. In Death On Two Legs, Mercury hurls a series of enunciated curses: "You suck my blood like a leech ... you're a sewer rat decaying in a cesspool of pride." The song, Mercury says with a smile, shows him in "one of my docile moods...
...photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist." This is what an arrogant leech-upon-artists-type says in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And it's a measure of his pretension that he thinks a picture of the corner drugstore down the street, a store you might pass every day, couldn't have any "dignity." But in the novel, his contemporaries nod in assent, and Proust himself might accept this sentimental notion...