Word: priggishness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...motto, borrowed from a religious martyr, was Resist. "Resisting" many a Frenchman, Nicole at 18 went to Dublin to teach French in a language school. When she met Michael Brandon, handsome journalist, and budding diplomat, her resistance collapsed-against the universal warning of her friends, who called him arrogant, priggish, sadistic and a lot besides...
...solemn Whig lad, David Balfour of Shaws, 14-year-old Freddie Bartholomew may be a shade on the jackanapes side for those who want their Stevenson straight, but he fits this feckless Fox version. Gibbous nose aloft and in fine priggish voice, Master Freddie imparts phonetic reality to an age when Britishers wrote s's that looked like...
...person, he likes to use much stiff-legged literarities as "flavicomous, ecology, otiose," speaks of people "occluding" the doorway. But his wistful better nature comes to the fore in his characters' speeches, which are always from the heart. Says Rosamund: "One has such a horror of being either priggish or sentimental. They call me sentimental in my books, but I'm not really." Says Clive: "Me! Oh, I'm just a rather affectionate sort of ass." Author Deeping can be alarmingly severe with people he doesn't like, such as Norah, Rosamund's older sister...
Alain was blond, handsome, a little priggish, a pampered only son. He bought Saha at a cat show, raised her for three years, delighted in her quiet, affectionate tricks. He had a few misgivings when he married Camille, who was modern, athletic, informed, impulsive, changeable as a mountain stream. But he lost them during their honeymoon and only began to harbor a secret resentment at Camille's plans for remaking their house. While it was being done over they lived on the ninth floor of a Paris apartment, to which Alain soon found an excuse for bringing...
While most novelists attempt to develop character, few have realized how effectively the principal actor can tell about himself in the third person. Biographies, even though fictitious, seem to lack vitality and autobiographies, when the narrator is of little consequence in world affairs, are invariably priggish. Percy Marks has happily hit upon a working solution of this dilemma in "A Tree Grown Straight" and, incidentally, has written the best analysis of the problems of our generation...