Word: wife
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...demented encounter group leader, half psychotic drill sergeant, he strips people naked with a sentence. He tells the fat adolescent waitress nobody will marry her. He calls her macho greaser heart-throb, Red Ryder, a fairy. He calls the bluff of an effete, narcissitic New Yorker and waves his wife's priceless violin around threatening to smash it if she doesn't do his bid ding. When the husband tries to come to her aid he shoots...
...foreign students who found him aware of and sympathetic to their special concerns and anxieties in this vast, busy and often cold University. We loved him-but did not always dare say it to that master of understatement. He embodied the highest values of American liberalism, just as his wife Alla, with her warm good spirits and her wonderful way of telling stories, embodies all that is best in Russian culture...
Waugh's first wife ran off with a future baronet, and betrayal by women is recurrent in much of his fiction. The ladies are usually charming and never malicious but they are prime examples in Waugh' natural history of thoughtlessness. Thei egoism, stupidity, conceit and self-regard become the causes for both cruelty and comedy. In A Handful of Dust, for ex ample, Brenda Last cheats on her hus band Tony. He journeys to South Amer ica and ends as the prisoner of an illiterate jungle madman who makes Tony read Dickens aloud to him for the rest...
...acquired recognition, Waugh adopted the ways and means of a country gentleman. In a big house he lived surrounded by six children, his second wife Laura, servants, heavy furniture, mullioned windows and good bindings. He was never chatty about his work. On those few occasions when he lowered the drawbridge to journalists, Waugh remained grandly indifferent to explanations of his comic genius. He insisted, "I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language...
...content: "He fought winter as if it were the true enemy: if he tore into it the freeze would vanish, his ills be gone, his life, his work, fall into place." Nothing helps. Lawrence eludes the biographer, and the book grinds to a stop. Dubin's wife Kitty is jittery about becoming older; she misses the son and daughter who have grown up and left. So does Dubin, sinking ever deeper into depression: "I am in my thoughts a detached lonely man, my na ture subdued by how I've lived and the lives I've written...