Word: smugly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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During his four-and-a-half year wartime sojourn in Madrid, Hoare evidently was neither hesitant nor mercurial in his attitude to the Falange and its "fat, smug, complacent" leader, as he calls Franco. For once, there were no complaints of indecisiveness raised against him at home. In this first volume of his memoirs, the British Ambassador reviews these years, and draws from their experience a few striking and forceful, if not novel, conclusions. His complete condemnation of Franco as an inept dictator is the most vigorously expressed of these conclusions...
Like former U.S. Ambassador Carlton J. H. Hayes (Wartime Mission in Spain), Sir Samuel speaks warmly and gratefully of Jordana, who died in August 1944. Unlike Hayes, who apparently considered Franco a "cautious" if annoying politician, he rips the "little Generalissimo" up & down: "Fat, smug, self-complacent . . . convinced that all his actions are inspired from heaven . . . the chief cause of a Spain divided within itself and isolated from the civilized world...
Highlights of History. Two recent pictures, little highlights of history, illustrate Koestler's meaning. One shows Communist boss Jacques Duclos (see cut) bouncing out of his first conference with new Premier Leon Blum. Duclos is unmistakably the master, a rotund figure of smug and pregnant power. The other picture shows France's new Socialist Cabinet. On the eve of taking office, they are just as unmistakably the defeated-pathetic shadows, human ciphers called to the semblance of power, but denied even the illusion of political effectiveness. For, says Koestler, "the French Socialists have lost both their courage...
...strikes which had cost about 4,500,000 man-working-days in 1946 were well out of the way; as the year opened only 1,600 (see below) were on strike. Furthermore, the price line had been held. Looking at the U.S., Canadians could feel smug because their own prices, under orderly decontrol, had stayed fairly firm. They were up only 6½% in the last 18 months, and business was excellent...
...theater. It has too many characters to keep it tidy or taut; its clash of viewpoints never quite boils up into drama; its culminating melodrama is clumsily handled and unexciting. But it remains an honest approach to a vital subject. And if it sounds sharp warnings, it offers no smug answers; it is evidence given in the witness box, rather than a resounding verdict handed down from the bench...