Word: snobs
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...supporting cast! Much more than Poirot, Miss Marple inhabits a fixed and lively world. There is her tactless next-door neighbor, Miss Hartnell. "weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor"; the wealthy, amiable Bantrys; taciturn Sir Henry dithering, who once ran Scotland Yard; and the village snob, Mrs. Price Ridley. Among Agatha Christie lovers, that lady is justly famous for putting a pound in the offertory bag on the anniversary of her son's death and then severely taxing gentle Vicar Clement when his counts show the largest contribution that Sunday to be ten shillings...
Marlowe was an appropriate creation by a man who was himself an anthology of ambiguity. Biographer Frank McShane, Professor of creative writing at Columbia University, offers sheaves of contradictions from Raymond Chandler's long but unprolific career. His colloquial American fiction was written by a snob trained in an English public school and weaned on Latin and Greek. The disabuse Marlowe was the polar opposite of his creator, a sentimentalist who liked to write doggerel about "brief butterfly hours." Marlowe was surrounded by young ladies of wondrously easy virtue; Chandler adored his mother and married a woman 20 years...
...many Laborites regard Jenkins as a cultural snob with no taste for the rough give and take of either domestic or international politics. The son of a Welsh coal miner who became parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Jenkins was a student at Oxford's Balliol College, where he took first honors in politics, philosophy and economics. He also acquired an upper-class "mandarin" accent, excellent French and a taste for claret and opera-none of which are especially valued by the party's old guard...
...times airily ignore Tony. When he invited guests to Kensington Palace, she would breeze through the room, stopping long enough only to cast a chill on the festivities. To many Britons who had learned to love the impish princess in her younger days, she had become an imperious snob who performed her chores disinterestedly. "We got all of the noblesse," groused one Londoner last week, "and none of the oblige...
Sykes never shies away from ethical judgments, and sometimes seems to be writing a Victorian headmaster's report on a wayward but talented boy. The really nagging questions about Waugh--Why does he seem to have been such a reprehensible snob? and Why were his political views so crustily troglodytic?--are fully and fairly dealt with. Waugh is not exonerated, but is saved from the coarser kind of misinterpretation. "His belief in the right kind of people was very much weaker than his belief that there are wrong kinds," Sykes says mournfully. Waugh identified himself wholeheartedly with an old order...