Word: priggishness
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...sand that becomes a major irritation in the viewer's eye. She and circumstance are enough to drive Robert to the family home on an island in Puget Sound. There he views the wreckage of three lives. His autocratic father is paralyzed by strokes; his brother is a priggish martinet; his rabbity sister Tita (Lois Smith), an accomplished recital pianist, still looks as if someone is about to rap her knuckles for improper fingering...
...time is the '20s and the maiden is Yvette (Joanna Shimkus), who steps backward from French finishing school to her father's claustrophobic vicarage in northern England. The old authorities are reasserted, and Yvette is briefly cowed by her hectoring, rectoring father (Maurice Denham) and his priggish relatives. But there is a new spirit in the air. symbolized by soul-quickening jazz, bobbed hair and notions of the emancipated woman. Yvette soon tastes the salt in her blood and begins to seek the fast company of Mrs. Fawcett (Honor Blackman) and her lover, Major Eastwood (Mark Burns). Even...
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...