Word: smug
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...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...
...Settles In. The characters in Thurber's drawings and stories are mostly pre-intentionalists themselves. There is the wife, yelling "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?" and there is the hippopotamus, looking smug. Inside the hippo, the reader feels sure, is Dr. Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, "knows vaguely that the nation...
Bert's Pants. Caldwell's special quality is a wonderful ease; he evokes humor or horror without bravura or its opposite, the smug underplaying that leaves the reader, at the end of so many short stories, disappointedly clutching a glazed lump of irony in the form of a souvenir ashtray. Caldwell gives away no pottery. In a leisurely way, yet wasting no time with scene-setting, he lays out his dialogue and his few spare sentences of narration. The characters take shape quickly as the story forms. At the end, amazingly often, what the reader takes away...
...indictment completed, the myth of "Imperial Harvard" stand, much assailed and much lampooned, but nevertheless alive and vital. Harvard is overrated, effete, thin, smug, decaying, but still... What greater tribute than Cunliffe's final sentence: "If I were an American I would want my son to go there...