Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...General de Gaulle together. But the conflict between Giraud and De Gaulle was indicative of a basic disagreement between U.S. and British foreign policies. Expressive of the disgust which U.S.-backed policies inspired in many Anglo-Saxon minds was a false news bulletin, dated Jan. 7, 1945, which a wit posted in no less a place than Allied Headquarters in Algiers. It read...
...Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga." To Novelist Charles Brackett, he seemed "a competent old horror with a style that combined clear treacle and pure black bile." Critic Percy Hammond found him "a mountainous jelly of hips, jowls and torso [but with] brains sinewy and athletic." Caustic Wit Dorothy Parker thought that he did "more kindness" than anyone she had ever known...
...couple of decades Woollcott made himself a notorious wiseacre occupying a Manhattan apartment ("Wit's End") where he expounded his liberal beliefs, struck extravagant attitudes, greeted friends ("Hello, repulsive"), dismissed bores ("I find you are beginning to disgust me, puss. How about getting the hell out of here...
Here is a truly extraordinary book, a one-man five-ring verbal circus, a phantasmagoria of wit, satire, irony, invective, diatribe, rhetoric, and pulpit oratory. The style is variously compounded of elements from Sterne, Carlyle, Swift, H. L. Mencken, and the book of Jeremiah. Yet, appearing now at a time of national introspection and moral house-cleaning, it should be a valuable book, entirely aside from its qualities as pure entertainment. Wylie claims to have been breathing the same brand of fire for the last twenty or so years, predicting the future importance of bombing and the black-hearted intentions...
...Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...