Word: rapscallion
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Those who are led (by its jacket's encomiums) to expect another South Wind or even a Vile Bodies are in for a disagreeable disappointment. This portrait of an old rapscallion is satire too cold to be amusing; it is written with the analytic distaste of one who watches without pity the dwindling of a pathologically older generation...
...seems wonderful, in spite of the grimy furnace room he inhabits, the scarecrow clothes he has to wear, the scanty food and few friends. Gradually his high idealism is undermined and he begins to see college as a picture of an unjust and meaningless world outside. "Forenoon" McClintock, a rapscallion fellow-roomer in Vridar's boarding house, helps to complete his disillusioning education. "Forenoon," a devil with the women, is always after Vridar to join him in his forays. But Vridar considers himself engaged to easy-going Neloa Doole at home. Besides, when he gets near a girl...
...gusty Author Rascoe as a peg on which to hang his theory, already secondhand, that the real Jesus was a political zealot named Simon Bar Gi'ora, that the four Gospels were really an allegory of an unsuccessful Jewish revolt against Rome. Not Petronius Arbiter but his more rapscallion son, thinks Author Rascoe, was the author of the famed Satyricon, earliest picaresque novel. The neglected Lucian, great debunker of his day (2nd Century), he calls "the most modern of all writers of antiquity," compares him favorably with Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken. Though D. H. Lawrence "gives...
...when old Mr. Ainsley died, Carr was managing the firm and making a pretty penny for Catherine, who had inherited a controlling interest. All might have been well with Carr and his family if Catherine's heart had not been bigger than her brain. Lomas, Cordelia's rapscallion brother, had been courting her for years, and though Catherine despised him she finally gave in, to discover too late that she had made the mistake of her life. To save Carr's name from being dragged in the mud by Lomas, Catherine withdrew her capital from the firm...
...same table with his practically naked mistress, it was too much. The Duchess would not; the Duke slapped her; she went to the Holy Roman Emperor and told on him. So Duke Heinrich found himself deposed. Then began a picaresque and piggish progress as the Duke and his rapscallion retinue sponged their way around Europe. The Duke failed notably to have himself made King of Poland. He failed to stir up Germany against the Holy Roman Empire. Though he made enough of an impression on the Counts Palatine and Conde to get on their army payroll (which...