Word: mocker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...earth, Goethe's, loving wisdom, seeks omniscience. Power inspires sharper drama than knowledge, particularly for those without the German to follow Faust's speculations and soliloquizings. Goethe's Mephistopheles, on the other hand, boasts some of the internationalism of Hell. Less fiend than cold-blooded mocker and cynic, he is full of wit and mischief, and Gustaf Gründgens, who plays him nimbly enough, has the one role that can often make action as expressive as words...
This is more than melodrama, Translator Graves easily persuades the reader. Alarcon, the firebrand grown conservative, still is a mocker. His gentle irony is aimed partly at the lofty aspirations of youth, and also, less obviously, at the easy com promises of age. The author's characters, particularly those that are, in part, self-caricatures, are drawn with accuracy and wit. Alarcón's description of a selfconscious, self-elected young genius shows why his book is worth Graves's trouble and the reader's time: "A young man, pale and gloomy, who avoids mankind...
...Rose Macaulay's frequent literary treatment of the struggles of the free spirit against rigid mores. The witty, bloodless, polished writer that emerged was-in words she used to describe a character in Staying With Relations-"ironic, amused, passionless, detached, elegantly celibate . . . a traveled European, a bland mocker, a rather mincing young gentlewoman...
...says Author Mitford tartly, "of middle-class intellectuals, cosmopolitan Sodomites and Prussian soldiers"; moreover, jealous Emilie detested Frederick for trying to lure her lover to the Prussian court. Frederick's efforts to do so make some of the funniest sections of the book. Luckily for Emilie. monarch and mocker could not always hit it off-though Voltaire, in his way, was a just man and never wearied of saying "what a miracle [it was] that this son of a crowned ogre, brought up among animals, should have such a great love of French civilization." In long, nattering letters...
Whether Author Gogarty is only temporarily holding himself in, or really means to start living down the legends of his past, I Follow Saint Patrick is, for him, a strangely subdued and pious piece of writing. Of Gogarty the "wit, poet, mocker, enthusiast" and original of bawdy Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses, the poet is about all that remains. As hagiographer of Ireland's patron saint, Gogarty writes as one on holy ground, and it has taken most of the Elizabethan starch...