Word: mordant
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What is demonstrated in fascinating incident and mordant detail as the Vera rolls to Bremerhaven is that they are pitifully identical: they are human, and thus, the author translates, they are pathetic, contemptible fools...
...speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there is not a line of dialogue. The book's most vivid presence is that of Author Stacton, brooding in mordant aphorisms about the uses of power. Everything is stated in epigrams, and he can drop the material for an evening's argument into an apparently offhand phrase such as: "Like all fanatics, he thought in negatives...
...precisely what your love for me would destroy," he writes Héléne. So Héléne returns to her fiancé, body unseduced but mind converted to an abort-as-you-go philosophy of premarital sex. Author Vailland, 54, can be both tough and mordant, as he brilliantly proved in The Law, a grim parable of the jostling hierarchies and jealousies in an Italian village. In Turn of the Wheel, written nine years earlier, his feuding couple are too clearly only paper marionettes, spitting out and dissecting the axioms that he puts into their mouths...
...question reverberated last week from the leathery fastnesses of St. James's clubs to the House of Commons smoking room. With mordant relish, Britons were discussing a new biography of Neville Chamberlain, in which the Man of Munich is pictured not as a vain, gullible appeaser but as a bold, imaginative statesman who took the only gamble open to him. What gave the debate an irresistible piquancy was that Chamberlain's apologist is Iain Macleod, 48, chairman of the Conservative Party, leader of the House of Commons and an odds-on candidate to succeed Harold Macmillan as Prime...
Small & Nasty. At their best, O'Hara's stories have no murky depths, but a kind of mordant clarity. Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly is a quick, clear look at the phenomena of brotherly hate. A middle-aged no-good arrives at an industrial park to put the touch on his brother, who runs the place. He treads indifferently on the sensibilities of a couple of employees, listens stonily while his brother tells him he is worthless. But once he has the check in hand, he leaves with a sneer for his brother and, as a parting note...