Word: spiv
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gogol published the first part of his greatest work. Dead Souls, a novel that brilliantly exposed a brutal anachronism of Russian life: serfdom. Serfs, like any other property, could be mortgaged. Gogol introduced a sort of Russian spiv who speculated in "dead souls,'' i.e., defunct but still financially negotiable persons...
...kamikazes." To enforce the law in their burgeoning metropolis, Tokyoites have the services of 22,334 policemen (now equipped with nightsticks and U.S.-made .38-cal. revolvers instead of swords). One of the police force's biggest headaches: a spreading rash of crimes of violence by the spiv and Teddy-boy element of the city's 350,000 students, whose favorite weapons are knives and bicycle chains...
...bestseller, Room at the Top, by John Braine, published in England just ten weeks ago, the third face of Lucky Jim emerges: that of the intellectual spiv ruthlessly making his luck. Joe Lampton is only a town clerk, but he knows what he wants-an Aston-Martin sports car, a villa in Cannes, and a girl who will look just right in either. When the daughter of the local industrial tycoon pops the question, "Joe, do you really love me?" Joe coos back sweet nothings in the shape of five zeros: "A hundred thousand pounds' worth." Room...
...this setting-much of it familiar Greenery-Milty Hall emerges as a boozy bounder who resembles one of Dostoevsky's moral idiots with gin instead of vodka to fuel his false fires. He is a middle-class spiv of genius, a portrait of all those who can make love or a piece of change among the ruins. In the wake of World War II armies, he had moved unerringly into the black market up the Italian peninsula into Vienna, but eventually he seemed condemned to living off his wife in London. The need for propaganda ("You just pick...
...Spivs & Mistresses. Since Author Wilson's implicit tenet is that to know people is to loathe them, the people closest to Gerald are farthest from him. His Danish wife is an octupal mom rich in bloodcurdling whimsy who speaks Teutonically fractured English. Their best years together have been the long ones they have spent apart. Gerald's only daughter has married a slack-spirited intellectual snob. His younger son is a BBC television personality whose public pitch is heart-tugging interviews with the wronged; privately, he is enamored of a blackmailing, homosexual spiv. Gerald's elder...