Word: pettishly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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West Europe, Ltd. Connolly's less agreeable qualities include a tone of pettish portentousness into which he falls when writing of philosophical or religious matters that he can taste but cannot fathom. At Eton little Cyril preserved a pious air in chapel, though reading his blackbound Petronius instead of the prayer book; in more adult ways he has continued...
...Pettish critics have sometimes said that reading Jules Remains' serial novel, Men of Good Will, is like reading backfiles of French newspapers from Oct. 6, 1908. The New York Times's hardworking Critic Ralph Thompson once remarked in a fit of exasperation that Remains' "theory of fiction is almost intolerable." But The New Yorker's Clifton Fadiman has stuck to his opinion that Men of Good Will "is the Comedie Humaine of and for the 20th Century." Tired critics and trustful critics have divided over the question whether the finished job (in 27 volumes, as planned...