Word: priggishness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shuttling between the intriguing past and the insipid present, Richard Young, a priggish fellow, attempts to keep his vulgarian wife ignorant of his new time travel kick but succeeds only in riveting her-and a wary community's-attention upon his strange behavior. Du Maurier's view of both modern and medieval marriage is remarkably waspish, but it is this very connubial bitchiness that keeps the novel from a routine Gothicism and makes it a stylish, contemporary entertainment...
Educated in Geneva and Spain, Borges, as John Barth notes, "seems to have read almost everything." His lectures and writings are scholarly without being bookish. (He deprecates "Cyclical Light," an early poem, as "priggish." "Of course I was young when I wrote it. I had to work in all those Greek names.") The broad background frames but never inhibits his intelligent, singular and personal world. Robert Lowell, introducing the fantast at a reading Wednesday night, called Borges' work amid that of other writers "always an oasis in a sea of competence...
...book from being merely an insider's memoir of the liberal British intelligentsia-although on this level alone it is very highly readable. It is still amusing to hear, in Woolf's tone of melancholy malice, how "Tom" Eliot confessed that he had "behaved like a priggish, pompous little ass" on a weekend. And it is still poignant to learn that Sigmund Freud, ravaged by terminal cancer of the mouth and giving the appearance of "a half-extinct volcano," presented Virginia Woolf with a flower...
...have their task cut out for them in this relentlessly uplifting honeypot. A first novel by the author of A Man Called Peter, this book tells of the Cutter Gap mountain mission in East Tennessee back in 1912: isolated mountaineers, moonshine, feuds, babies. Author Marshall concentrates laboriously on three priggish mission staffers: the dewy-eyed Christy, a saintly Quaker lady, and a bombastic young preacher. The women are courageous and silent sufferers, the men are boys, the children are rough little angels. To paraphrase one mountain woman, the book "sort of wears the bright...
...foil to the character of Macbeth. Here, as John Devlin plays him, he comes off rather colorless. Ernest Graves' Duncan, though gray-haired, is younger than usual--which is in keeping with Colicos' Macbeth, since the two are first cousins. John Cunningham's Malcolm is crisply spoken, but too priggish for my taste; I almost regret that he does gain the throne...