Word: sparkingly
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...awfully hard to shift an Edsel, though, and George Ford has but a few weeks to spark life into what has been a lackluster season thus...
...years it seemed that Novelist Muriel Spark had talent to burn. Then, in the late 1960s, a suspicion arose that burning was exactly what she had done with it. Gone was the somber exuberance of such earlier triumphs as Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means. The froth turned sour and her amused awareness of human daffiness was drowned in simple venom. The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Spark's deft parody of Watergate set in an English convent, gave reason to hope that all was not lost. The Takeover proves that nothing...
...Spark does not say, but then she does not really have to. She is content, like Yeats' golden bird, to sing of what is past, or passing, or to come...
Like many of Muriel Spark's best characters, however, Maggie keeps busy being clever. She complains that the "tempo" of her husband's lovemaking is all wrong: "He starts off adagio, adagio. Second phase, well, you might call it al legro ma non troppo and pretty nervy . . ." When she is offstage, Hubert the poseur can usually be counted on for verbal sprightliness. "What is opulence," he asks in his best Oscar Wilde manner, "but a semblance of opulence...
...Spark hints at dark spiritual convulsions, a "new world which was arising out of the ashes of the old, avid for immaterialism." Toward the end of the book, the fraudulent Hubert is lionized by a crowd of jaded Romans as a spokes man for the vengeful goddess Diana...