Word: pukka
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...turned apostate to that religion by marrying a teen-age French girl. Poor Cecil seems not to realize that his wife is socially handicapped by a hint of Arab ancestry and an arty kid brother. The plot turns on Cecil's attempts to introduce his bride into the pukka colony (her first appearance on the tennis courts is a satiric fiasco) and his maneuvering for a promotion. There is taut melodrama involving the escape of a couple of interned Palestinian terrorists, who call Cecil "Spurgeon the Virgin" (possibly the reason why Author Griffin gave him this family name...
...perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge in 1922.) Next, the half brother interviews Sebastian's secretary and literary executor, a fatuous bundle of sociological cliches. Then there are Sebastian's two mistresses. As the investigator probes on, it is not one Sebastian Knight who emerges...
...There are three things which are real," Indian-Irish Author Aubrey Menen once wrote, "God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third." Urbane Satirist Menen has siphoned laughter out of stuffy pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches') and sacred Hindu myths (The Ramayana). Rarely has his comic touch been lighter or more impolite than in this current spoof on science...
When news of this bloodless defeat reached Iceland's capital of Reykjavik, outraged citizens massed before the residence of Britain's Ambassador Andrew G. Gilchrist, began pitching stones and bricks. Inside, Ambassador Gilchrist, a 48-year-old Scot with a Vandyke beard, reacted in the approved pukka sahib tradition. He put on a bagpipe recording to drown out the shouts from the street, and remarked of the mob's marksmanship that "if they were cricket players, they would be better shots." He further daunted the unruly natives by walking his dog at the height of the uproar...
Murray's "cutpurses, burglars, father-beaters" become, in Young's thistly translation, "houssbrakars, sporranslitters, daddie-dadders." Young is not above throwing foreign phrases into his Lallans: "He's a richt pukka sahib, your maister...