Word: spiv
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sammy run. Money, of course. Sammy (Anthony Newley) is chasing the ochre and he is chasing it hard, because if he can't catch up with 300 quid before sunset, some very unpleasant people are going to catch up with him-it seems his bookie is disinclined to spiv and let spiv...
...Spiv & Tart. Mother rules their lives in death as she did in life. They build a sort of playhouse in her tomb in the backyard lily patch and call it The Tabernacle, and slowly evolve the forms of a religion based on the dead. Hymns and the promulgation of rules and cruel punishments comprise its simple liturgy. The fact is-not that facts, as such, mean much to them-that mother was a local scandal as a woman of loose morals (which is partly why the adults accepted the kids' story that mother was "sick...
...print books by genuine travelers. He had never been anywhere farther flung than a pension on the French Riviera. His name was sometimes Robinson, but as a last resort, Pimley. Then it transpires that even his death was phony. He is very much alive, a slightly hangdog young minor spiv and con man who has happily dropped the burdens of authorship in favor of marriage to a sprightly American divorcee with silver hair and a white and gold yacht. Powell has a truly English wariness toward women, whom he seems to regard, at best, as dangerous domestic pets always ready...
...virgin shopgirl who finally discovers the love she has been missing, the deserted wife (or were they ever married?) who throws herself down two flights of stairs to induce an abortion, the incomparable spiv who is closer to the heart of modern England than anything Kipling had in mind, move through Author Lessing's narrative like pulsing presences. This is the kind of slice-of-life book that can get to be, and almost always is, a bore at about Chapter 2. What saves it for Author Lessing and the reader is the artlessness that conceals art, the conversational...
Hero Griff (Gryffydd) seems at first blink to be just another Lucky Jim type of intellectual spiv-on-the-make. He even makes faces at himself like his famous prototype and is obsessively concerned with the impression he produces in important people (it is usually unfortunate: he wears his first dinner jacket to a cocktail party). But this novel tells not of successful spivery but of a village innocence doggedly preserved amid fleshpots and sophistries-although the fleshpots are rather lean and the sophistries baffling only to Griff, the simple mathematician. Lydia Kilmartin, Eng. Lit., "smashing figure," is probably...