Word: smollett
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...save a ball for the women and children." The reader can have himself a different kind of ball with this book-if he will only persevere. Versatile Author Taylor (Center Ring, W. C. Fields) follows in the footsteps of a master of the picaresque. Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) was a superbly comical novel, in letter form, about a family traveling around England in the days of highwaymen and top-heavy coaches. Author Taylor's book is not only a parody of Smollett's parody of 18th century travelogues, but of every Western...
...more than a question of manners. There is in much of our early fiction-in Fielding and Smollett, for example-a lot of rough-and-tumble, knockabout brutality, as much a reflection of its time as Hogarth's pictures were. But this new violence, with its sadistic overtones, is quite different. It is not simply coarse, brutal from a want of refinement and nerves, but genuinely corrupt, fundamentally unhealthy and evil. It does not suggest the fairground, the cattle market, the boxing booth, the horseplay of exuberant young males. It smells of concentration camps and the basements of secret...
...fertile and gifted English writer whose juicy novels are beginning to win the applause they deserve. While Gary's subject is 20th Century life, his work carries the rich old tone of the 18th Century English novel: the satiric shrewdness of a Fielding, the burly gusto of a Smollett, the finely cut detail of a Defoe. To undernourished imaginations, Gary offers a fat literary pudding, steaming with the odors of traditional England...
...Patients. Two events (unforeseen by Smollett) changed Bath. One was a series of German "Baedeker" air raids, aimed at Britain's historical landmarks, which damaged or destroyed 19,000 buildings in Bath, and made the town overcrowded again. The other was the advent of Britain's Labor government. Minister of Health Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan decided that suitable hospital cases could get free spa treatment under his National Health scheme. The Health Ministry found that it was not going to be easy to decide who was "suitable." A mere yen to go down to a spa like the rich...
...Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen," said one Smollett character, "who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey upon the blubber of those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected -with the same rage of displaying their importance; and the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext to insist upon being conveyed to Bath, where they may hobble country-dances and cotillons among lordlings, squires, counselors, and clergy...