Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...four years as National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration have enlivened Georgetown cocktail parties with outrage and titillation over his putdowns of erstwhile colleagues. He has waved the furor aside, saying that what matters is not whether former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance personifies the decline of the Wasp elite, or whether "the loving way" that Walter Mondale combed his hair betrayed insecurity, but the "substance" of the issues he tackles in these pages...
...Detail is her forte; generalizations do not always survive mass cliches. The author gives excellent treatment to Tarnower's complex anti-Semitism. Alexander grounds her conclusions in a wealth of quotations. But attributing Harris's tragic end to the emotional frustration of "ladies of a particular northern upper-class WASP variety" becomes a kind of shorthand which hinders us from understanding Jean Harris's personality...
...funerals; social upheavals ranging from suburbanization to the sexual revolution. But only the echoes of change are heard in the trophy room of a venerable men's club, the sole setting of The Middle Ages. In a time of ethnicity, the club remains a haven for an embattled Wasp old guard. For the younger generation that departs on a picaresque journey through the chaotic world outside, the club is a beacon, a symbol of the formative power of tradition even on those who would escape its sway...
More and more, the characters in each successive novel grappic with the same religious and psychological dilemmas that L 'Engle confronts regularly as the cathedral's writer-in-residence and Laypreacher. The title of A Severed Wasp comes from a George Orwell quotation about the death of society's religious beliefs and the excision of modern man's soul. L 'Engle describes herself as "a striving Christian-striving to be Christian somehow in a world where Christians are doing such terrible things...
...modern pathfinder is also very much a man of the mid-20th century: liberally educated and not reluctant to parade it, perversely triumphant in a milieu he blithely declares himself unfit to inhabit, japing and shambling after women, with a quip and an invisible cigar, like a Wasp Groucho. In later episodes, Hawkeye occasionally looked as if he were campaigning for canonization. But he could still bend, and come near breaking, whether in realizing he had a serious drinking problem or in surrendering to the inexplicable but powerful erotic appeal of his long time nemesis, Hot Lips Houlihan...