Word: smugness
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...craving for a thousand decibel dry hump. And Howard Wales' sterile charade delivers: drum solos with all the pulse of a seconal addict; keyboard work with all the sensuousness and imagination of a computer print out; treacly singing; the stage presence of a sloth; and above it all in smug squalor was the ego of Wales, ballooning over the audience with all the magnificence of a slug in heat...
...woes of the others seem somehow pathetic and finally enervating, partly because they are so deeply selfish. If nothing else, Miss Murdoch has pulled one new switch in this book by replacing the complacent American, so often a carefully drawn figure in British comedy, with a cast of smug Englishmen whose horizons have shrunk to little-England dimensions...
Kiley is marvelously intuitive in the role, capturing both the smug vanity and simultaneous vulnerability of literature's seedy hangers-on. In A.V. Laider, Kiley is a prescient palmist who foretells the death of four people riding in a railway coach. Or does he? Beerbohm is having a little fun with the old writer's problem of illusion and reality. Neither story is much more than an attenuated anecdote told over brandy and cigars...
...Berger, 42, perhaps America's leading religious sociologist, first won attention with The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, a trenchant attack on the smug, conventional Protestant churches of the 1950s. Back then, Berger reminded the ecumenical leaders last week, he and other critics seemed to be "banging against the locked gates of majestically self-confident institutional edifices." The situation could not be more different today. In the years since, said Berger, Protestants have suffered a failure of nerve and are wallowing in "masochistic self-laceration" or "hysterical defensiveness." He bluntly told the ecumenists that their efforts to regroup...
...powerful than Abbie Hoffman! Faster on the guff than Bella Abzug! Able to leap Baron Munchausen in a single bound! It's Supercop Jack Muller, the Chicago letter-of-the-law man who for 25 years has been causing pain and embarrassment to that city's politicians, smug elite and privileged hoodlums...