Word: smug
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...side he came from and the interplay across the border. Johnson's books seem to offer Germans the gloomiest of choices. East Germany is a police state, less oppressive than the West thinks, but nevertheless no place to live. West Germany, though relatively free, is poisoned with smug, forgetful materialism and a lack of purpose...
...India's role in Asia and the world. India is still a long way from giving up its passion for neutrality. But the country is now angrily fighting off the kind of attack that, when suffered by others in the past, Indians always tried to talk away with smug moral platitudes. At least some of the country's illusions about peace, war and Communism are beginning to fade...
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...