Word: subacidity
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...Communist intellectuals, Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey was more than a gentleman - he was a bourgeois Bolshevik. He exuded respectability, which - next to an aura of romantic criminality - is the quality middle-class Marxists most prize. Was not his cousin Biographer Lytton Strachey, whose bland ironies and subacid wit had done as much as any one intellectual force to sap his generation's faith in education, the church, the state? Cousin Lytton had knocked the notions of pre-Communist intellectuals into a half-cocked hat so successfully that Cousin John had only to pick up the pieces...
...England's group of brilliant, middleaged, aristocratic women writers, whose leading light is Virginia Woolf, six-foot Poet Edith Sitwell is the most backwardly brilliant of them all. Obscure in her poetry, subacid in her satire, she finds the 18th Century real, the present ghostly...
...trade-mark of Ernest Bramah (E. B. Smith). His Kai Lung stories, which first began to appear 37 years ago and have been coming out at lengthy intervals ever since, have long delighted patient readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Their low-keyed humor, chess-game pace and subacid satire give them an effect somewhat less than sidesplitting, but for readers who like their slyness slow and stately, Ernest Bramah is a lordly dish. And The Return of Kai Lung shows that his salt has not lost its savor for being kept so long in the attic...
...famed butterfly was to Painter James Mcneill Whistler. The motto: Who & What is Gertrude Stein? "Widely ridiculed and seldom enjoyed," she is one of the least-read and most-publicized writers of the day. Her incom- prehensible sentences, in which an infuriating glimmer of shrewd sense or subacid humor is sometimes discernible, have generated the spark for many a journalistic wisecrack; except to the adventurous few who have been hardy enough to read her in the original (and to some of those) she has the reputation of a pure nonsense writer. To the man-in-the-street...
...Civil War. The Store tells particularly of Col. Miltiades Vaiden and his rise to notoriety in Florence, Ala., about the time of Grover Cleveland's presidencies. Written in the great tradition of well-peopled novels, the book successfully commingles impartial observation and ubiquitous sympathy, tinged with a faintly subacid humor. In pitch, scope, execution it is easily the most important U. S. novel of the year. Col. Miltiades Vaiden, a vastly human character who should walk straight into the U. S. Pantheon, is more than the central figure of the story. He is the focus in which the town...