Yes, Sassoon portrays a halcyon world – but, as the author observed 40 years later, it all adds up to "innocently insidious anti-war propaganda", and not just because of the blunt fact that the war sweeps away something so lovingly and beautifully described.
The insidious nature of war requires that our loved ones will be sacrificed.
As Warwick jousts with John Taylor Clayne Crawfordd), a scruffy bank robber on the lam who talks his way into Warwick's immaculate Los Angeles lair, you expect an insidious tug of war between an aesthete and a roughneck, similar to the power struggle of Clifton Webb's imperious dandy and Dana Andrews's earthy detective in "Laura".
The repeating images of planes slamming the twin towers, the intimations of insidious conspiracies and war preparations, the dramas of rescue and remembrance combined to display the full range of the medium's power -- to spook and calm, to inform and mislead, to offer hope and trigger tears.
Jokes about serious problems, like wars or torture, constrain discussion in a particularly insidious way: their humorousness undermines any criticism of the act of joking.
I was a soldier, but I know of no enemy in war more insidious or vicious than AIDS, an enemy that poses a clear and present danger to the world".
Then there is extra defence spending, and the loss of tax revenue caused by a large drug-fuelled informal economy.But the effect of the war is more insidious than the numbers imply.
He routinely uses the most vitriolic rhetoric as an insidious weapon in the extremist war on reason and simple justice.
But war is an insidious enemy, and all the more damaging when its implications reach you, through your dead brother, your orphaned friend or mother, or your embittered, sad teacher.
