Word: prig
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...Auden remarked once that he was "suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love." A prolific reviewer himself, Auden identified four varieties of critic: the prig, "for whom no actual poem is good enough since the only one that would be is the poem he would like to write himself but cannot." Second, the critic's critic--"on the surface he appears to idolize the poet...but his critical analysis of his idol's work is so much more complicated and difficult than the work itself...
...thirstiest friends was Evgeny Ivanov. Though he was a bit of a prig, Ivanov was a devoted reader of the steamy James Bond novels, found them "amusing but ridiculous." He professed to dislike loose women, did not like Christine even to use cosmetics. But one hot July night, recalls Christine, Ivanov finally "came to forsake all his principles and his pride. Suddenly he was kissing me, rolling his dark curls into my neck ..." Afterward, Ivanov was "sad, very...
...seems dedicated by Novelist Colin Wilson to the first of these notions. As to the second, the Diary will not sell sex, since the subject is presented at its worst-neither for play, passion nor procreation, but as a something-or-other that promotes the spiritual development of a prig. It is woeful stuff-the sort of Promethean flimflam that steams up from a painfully protracted puberty. One other question lingers in the mind: How was the author of this stupefyingly pretentious piffle ever mistaken for a young man of genius by London's most eminent critics...
Dora Harmsworth is frigid, while her husband Malcolm is a great prig. To make up for the lack of physical love, the pair chatter incessantly about love in the abstract...
...tells Stanhope, by laughing himself into a fatal hemorrhage while mimicking Stanhope's mandarin manner. The son's brutal questions lead Stanhope back into a past as dangerous as a minefield, where every step triggers explosive insights and revelations. By the final pages. Stanhope has progressed from prig to pitiful human. As his own life ebbs, he slowly realizes that Curtal's death had lost him not a hated enemy but a warm friend...