Word: mischiefism
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From the true Catholic point of view, his novels are depraved, perverted and, above all, malicious, in the strict theological sense of the word. His favorite characters, like Lady Metroland and Basil Seal in Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, do evil gratuitously, for the sheer fun of the thing...
...Things between the wars. Readers were somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the ending: the unheroic hero stands in the total blackness of the next war's no-man's-land, waiting to toss his Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking of Waugh's novels, reported the lunacies of Communist and fascist revolts...
...Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest), and the American evangelist, Mrs. Melrose Ape. With her cotton-winged angels (Chastity, Divine Discontent, et al.), Mrs. Ape wowed high society...
...years). Gide wrote in his Journals: "I do not know where I am going; but I am making progress." His progress was imperceptible to other eyes. Critics lambasted everything he wrote; to French Roman Catholics, his Corydon, a frank defense of homosexuality, was the devil's own mischief...
...hero of Great Mischief is Timothy, a pharmacist in Charleston, S.C., who dabbles in witchcraft. When the shapely...