Word: vilely
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...apart from Catch-22. It represents the second installment, so to speak, of Heller's War and Peace. Over ten years ago Heller explained: "The hero is the antithesis of Yossarian-20 years later." Of his Syrian-American bombardier in Catch-22 he had written: "It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it-lived forever, perhaps." Of his WASP business executive, Bob Slocum, in Something Happened, Heller might have written: It was a vile and muddy peace, and Slocum was dying of it-dying in slow motion...
...likable chap indeed. But since his appearance in 1954, critics and readers have remarked the spreading "swinishness" of Kingsley Amis characters-as well as the distaste the author seems to feel for his own creations. It has always been noted in extenuation that literary satire thrives on vile bodies and that swinishness justifies a measure of pique. But now Amis stands revealed as a misanthrope sans merci. From Ending Up it is clear that if anyone asked him the old vaudeville question "Would you hit a lady with a baby?" Amis might gleefully reply...
...kerosene lamp. A North Carolina moonshiner says simply: "Hits a blamed ugly drink." And then there is Colonel Leland DeVore, whose throat involuntarily contracts whenever he thinks of moonshine: "I hear, as if from far away, the gagging whisper of a long-lost friend whose favorite saying was 'Vile stuff-I wish I had a barrel...
...Numerous American officials have expressed their outrage about the Arab terrorism at Ma'alot. But recently the U.S. voted with other U.N. members to censure Israel for defending itself against precisely such vile acts. That vote places the U.S., in my opinion, in a position supporting the Arabs' cowardly attacks on Israeli civilians. My shame as an American is exceeded only by my bitter anger...
...part of a set of three short plays in which Coward starred in London in 1966. The curtain-raiser, Come into the Garden, Maud, is a fast five-finger exercise about a middle-aged American millionaire in Europe and his vile, blue-haired wife, whose hobby is collecting titled Europeans. With a witty tenderness, Coward has the amiable golfing millionaire, clad in Hush Puppies and a loud sport jacket, fall in love with a minor Italian princess and abandon his harpy wife. The talk is frequently funny: the husband dismisses one of his wife's friends as being...