Word: sagas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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James and William Goldman) shoots its best line in the title. In three acts, this small-bore saga of the peacetime army in the mid-'50s rarely hits a comic target that has not already been riddled in the long and simple-minded annals of G.I. humor...
...fiction have been as unlucky in love as John Blaydon. In two previously published books (Through Streets Broad and Narrow, In the Time of Greenbloom) chronicling various periods of John's life, he has consistently lost the girls he loves. In this third volume of the Blaydon family saga, John is beat out again, and this time by his dashing older brother, David. When Giselle, who is French and flighty, seems ready to return to his arms from her fling with Big Brother, John tells her pettishly: "I hate eating from dirty plates." Giselle responds: "You insulting little English...
...evacuation from Dunkirk of 338,226 British and French troops, soundly whipped by the German army but rescued by an improvised flotilla of 1,200 ships under week-long bombardment, was closer to triumph than to tragedy. By rights, the saga of Dunkirk deserves a Homer, but even in the jabbing, boilerplate prose of British Journalist Richard Collier, a reliable but uninspired artisan of "The Day That" books (The City That Would Not Die-TIME, Jan. II, 1960), the story vividly recalls the curious, human mosaic of heroic and horrifying experience that was pre-Hiroshima warfare...
...STORY OF YOUNG KING ARTHUR (by Clifton Fadiman, illustrated by Paul Liberovsky; Random House; $1.50). Like the actor who plays Hamlet, no author can wholly fail when telling the Arthurian saga. While no Malory or even a T. H. White (The Once and Future King) Author Fadiman is a cut above Lerner & Loewe (Camelot). His grave young hero seems to sense that he is on the threshold of a mythic destiny. Fadiman's Merlin is a wiser Polonius. His courts and tourna ments are a pageant of medieval glory as if they had been clipped from the film sequences...
...virtuous hero (Paul Penny feather of Decline and Fall, Adam Fenwick-Symes of Vile Bodies) whose reasoned view of an unreasoning world gave a special cutting edge to the elder Waugh's comedy. Auberon says he has no interest in being a professional novelist. He wrote The Foxglove Saga because it was what was expected of him in a literary family (his father wrote Decline and Fall at 25, and his Uncle Alec wrote Loom of Youth at 19). So "when Father told me, 'My boy, it is time you wrote your first book,' I took...