Word: one-upmanship
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...surprisingly, her hero, Matthew Pryar (Eton and Oxford), contributes some British one-upmanship to the stock drama of poet and pedant. He finds that all is alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation -Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget...
...found not in the novel itself, but in Dr. Fiedler's critical writings-notably Love and Death in the American Novel. Read thus, The Second Stone offers some of the rarest pleasure of the year, combining the attractions of Scrabble, the double-crostic, literary name-spotting and one-upmanship with the humbler delights of the whodunit. This is a parable and the characters are crazy mythed-up people...
Whatever its material from burlap to brocade, a hostess gown assures the lady of the house comfort, glamour, and a kind of one-upmanship on her guests. After a day over the old hot stove, she can slip quickly and ungirdled into the easy camouflage of full-length draperies. And while her guests have had to settle for party dresses of unspectacular street length (the better to get in and out of cabs or family cars), they are sure to find their basic blacks outshone by the lady in skirts who rustles out from the kitchen with...
...Charles Percy Snow is a novelist of one-upmanship in British science and politics. But seldom has Snow's fiction matched his life in the past year or so. His novel, The Affair, became a London stage hit that is Broadway bound; his Harvard lectures, "Science and Government," roused a storm that roiled the Establishment. Last month Critic F. R. Leavis subjected him to a savage literary mugging, and soon after, Snow suffered a detached retina that may cost the sight of his left eye. But last week Sir Charles ignored all trials for a new triumph: his installation...
...younger generation of English composers. Perhaps because he flunked out of Oxford for failing algebra, he has never had the slightest interest in "mucking about the tone-rows." And even if he did, he is not persuaded that it would help his reputation. These days, Walton observes, musical one-upmanship has become such a complex art that "it is quite possible to go in and out of fashion four or five times during one's lifetime...