Word: upmanship
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...packet; the hostess goes with it, and so does Priscilla Tolland. In fact, a head count shows that six previous survivors of the Powell epic are killed off in this novel. In Powell's war, only the rotters flourish-notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins' ear in a war of total paper...
...would only aggravate the already messy diplomatic problems. In the next breath, he severed all remaining diplomatic ties with Britain by closing the British mission in Salisbury and Rhodesia House in London. He blasted Harold Wilson's government as "hypocritical," and-in a sly bit of one-upmanship-claimed that the U.N. resolution itself "unwittingly acknowledged Rhodesia's independence...
...precious pair by installing his own man as Speaker unless he could talk the Tories or the Liberals into supplying a candidate for the job. The Tories are not likely to volunteer readily, for they would like nothing better than to see how adept Wilson is at one-upmanship when the House reassembles in October...
...stretch in jail. And by shrugging off sex, dryly noting its acceptance as a sort of public utility, Darling succeeds where other entries in the movie sleepstakes fumble. The sharpest asides occur in Capri, where the future principessa and her homosexual photographer-pal compete in a game of one-upmanship involving a dark-eyed waiter...
...keep up with the Joneses nowadays," says Manufacturer Sumpter Turner happily, "you have to raise your own tomatoes in January-as well as have plenty of orchids." But there is much more to it than green-thumb-upmanship. There is the satisfaction of growing or propagating plants for the outdoor garden instead of buying them, of cutting a spray of forsythia in midwinter and "forcing" it into a golden harbinger of spring, of watching a child's pride in his own waist-high plantation, and, not least, of dropping into a city florist's from time to time...