Word: rueful
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Three-Day Bat. The humor is more rueful in a short piece called XRay, written for The New Yorker in 1930. By that time Lardner's health was failing. He was drinking heavily, though still writing lightly. At the end the author is being carted to a hospital, his Lardner tone still unmistakable: "In an ambulance they made you ride lying down, whereas you can take your choice in a taxi...
JACKSON. By overstating his chances, Jackson greatly reduced the impact of his victory in New York and missed the big lift that he had sought. Jackson tried a rueful quip: "We got our landslide, but we just missed our majority." He had the best organization in the state and expended $650,000 and 20 days of personal campaigning-more than the investment in money and time of the other candidates combined. Nonetheless, he failed to expand his support much beyond his solid core of Jewish and blue-collar voters in the New York City area. He lost most...
...nothing intrinsically funny about widowhood, grass or otherwise, and it is a mistake to try to create big boffs, broad running jokes out of these conditions. Silly, honest, human errors occur when someone is trying to make a new life, and it should be possible to make gentle rueful human comedy out of the attempt to muddle through. But Phyllis is paced and played as if it were a zany farce. Fay is hobbled by an ex-husband whose profession is surely borscht-belt comedy. It is impossible to understand why she ever married this yakster. He is a creature...
This long, rueful novel successfully winds up Paul Scott's enormous masterwork, The Raj Quartet, a brooding view of the last years of British rule in India. Together, the four novels of this remarkable cycle-The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils-are a considerable achievement of art and intelligence...
...wife hid her red, swollen eyes behind large dark glasses; her expressive hands trembled. Normally an impeccable hostess, she was so rattled that she neglected to offer a drink to her visitor, TIME Correspondent William McWhirter. With a rueful laugh, she said: "The ridiculous thing is that people keep telephoning me, asking if I can help them. People on the street are so worried. I don't know why. I don't know why the poor people so fear Communism. Why didn't they go to the other side? Naturally, all the upper class would like...