Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Collectively, the group is alternately scathing and ridiculous. The former emerges most strongly in a thing called "Aftermyth of War" which effectively debunks the smug nonsense about Britain's war effort, but which also has recurring undertones of near horror and revulsion. (Dame Myra Hess is lampooned for her heroic series of concerts at the British Museum--surely not an inherently funny undertaking; and the skit ends with a singing of Auld Lang Syne which suddenly runs down like a broken record player, suggesting--what? That the whole war effort was a fraud? That the years of the war were...
...Personally, I think this drastic curtailment of the liberty of our press is against the public interest. This country is too smug, complacent and sluggish, and pointed criticism might do much to get us moving again." Added Cecil King, whose giant Daily Mirror (circ. 4,561,876), biggest newspaper in the Western world, stands as impressive evidence that he knows what Britons want to read: "But if, on consideration, the British public wants this censorship, of the press, at least they should realize how much of what they should know is not printed...
...ambivalence, he grins, marks Pushkin, his idol. His other heroes: Boris Pasternak; Hemingway, "my favorite prose writer by far"; Fidel Castro, whom he quotes gleefully as saying "Art should be free"; and Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the explosively original Bolshevik suicide who, like Evtushenko 30 years later, bitterly satirized the smug commissars of his time...
...Microcosm. Hughes does not write with a researcher's smug wisdom-after-the-event but with an artist's power of recording the past as if it were the living present. His method is that of creating a system of related microcosms (thus saving nine-tenths of the wordage of the usual novel of public events). In the German half of The Fox in the Attic, the microcosm is the family of Augustine's baronial kin, who live in a huge old castle near Munich...
...sequence of novels by C.P. Snow, provisionally entitled Strangers and Mothers. The first chapter of The Old Men at the Zoo is, in fact, simply a brilliant parody of Sir Charles' eight Lewis Eliot novels; Simon Carter, the narrator Mr. Wilson has devised, is a monstrous amalgam of the smug, self-conscious, self-mocking cadence and mechanical bleakness of thought peculiar to Eliot...