Word: vileness
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...what little can be done should be done; and here enters the grader. This man has a horrid job. He must read, by the dozens, illegible essays written on tedious subjects in vile English. And when he has finished each essay, he must somehow decide if it deserves, say, an 89 for a B-plus or a 90 for an A-minus. But miserable as the job is, it must always be done more carefully and conscientiously than it is done now in many cases. For although there is a lively cynicism at Harvard concerning the significance of grades, their...
...Michael's adolescent super-morality convinces him, as he tells his mother, that Sir John "was vile, and you weakened." To snarl things further, Michael's leftist Canadian "organization" believes Sir John to be a "menace to world industrial reorganization," and just one small step above a Fascist. Sizing up the dramatic possibilities, Michael becomes a moping, moody Hamlet. He believes Sir John murdered his father and accuses his mother of "living in sin" with Fletcher...
...after 14 dull pages. He began to make history instead. The last letter in Volume II is one he wrote to Mama from Warm Springs during the 1928 presidential campaign for Alfred E. Smith: "I spoke in Atlanta twice last Wednesday and there is an appalling amount of vile propaganda in circulation ... I have had a difficult time turning down the Governorship [of New York], letters and telegrams by the dozen begging me to save the situation by running, but I have been perfectly firm...
...Vile Bodies orchestrated the gay dance of death of Mayfair's Bright Young Things between the wars. Readers were somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the ending: the unheroic hero stands in the total blackness of the next war's no-man's-land, waiting to toss his Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking...
Those were the days when Waugh was being one of the Bright Young Things later satirized in Vile Bodies. But Evelyn was constantly widening his connections with the country gentry. He took up fox hunting and began to give examples of a personal courage about which he is quite bland but which amazes his friends. They still wince at the thought of the dauntless little pink-coated figure dashing at fences and ditches that would unnerve more experienced horsemen...