Word: smug
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...Brien was often labeled arbitrary, faddish, "plot-shy," and he made no secret of his liking for Chekhovian sketches and vignettes with a narrative content approaching zero. One of the stories in this collection-by Arthur Kober, dialectician laureate of The Bronx-is just a monologue by an offensively smug hash-house proprietor. Many are written in the fashionable (since Hemingway) stark-simple style which, slightly overdone, approximates baby talk. Thus John Fante (A Nun No More): "My mother cried and cried night and day. They couldn't stop her. . . . Finally Grandma Toscana called the priest. . . . Right away...
...diet made him sick. Savagely he etched and painted its hidden social sores and the festering minds of its leaders. When generals and duchesses commissioned him to do their portraits, he painted them, not as they would like to look, but as they really were: droopy, anemic cuckolds, smug gangsters, smirking strumpets. He etched bloated priests abusing women and embracing money bags, barely escaped the ire of the Inquisition by labeling them with trite moral maxims. On the walls of churches he gave angels the faces of well-known prostitutes, growling as he did so: "I will cause the faithful...
...natured, suspicious, truculent crowd among the Internationals - the Communist diehards. Politi cal opacity makes him bat around franti cally trying to rationalize the Russian Purge when it begins to disrupt the Inter national Brigades, leads him to an ac quiescence that would be dishonest if it were not merely smug...
...Leon Trotsky was a successful author with an adoring wife, a house in the suburbs and enough money to live in smug comfort. A lifetime devoted to the destruction of the middle class had made him one of its members...
Into a snug nutshell Paris-soir last week crammed a smug definition of Europe's war. It is a "conflict of two civilizations and of two mysticisms-that of gold or liberal capitalism, which is that of America, and that of the service of the State and of labor, which is that of Nazi Germany." Still paying lip service to gold and liberal capitalism, the men of Vichy indicated through their actions last week which "mysticism" Petain France endorsed. "Germany invites us to reconstruct Europe," wrote Rightist Deputy Fernand-Laurent in Le Jour. "I do not hesitate...