In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden.
To read Moynihan's earlier writings is to encounter an incisive intelligence and a fine, mandarin style (now sadly dissolved into a kind of self-absorbed baroque).
There's some idea that Updike's mandarin style and bearing distanced him from certain demographic slices of the population.
But his mandarin style and eccentric imagination seem best suited to the historical crime novel.
They wrote in the "mandarin" style, intellectual, experimental, difficult and exclusionary, as opposed to the "vernacular" (natural, pacey, populist), and one of the points of his book is to suggest the opposition to each other and limits of both.
The narrator clearly has elements of George Will in him (a "trademark bowtie," a penchant for baseball metaphors, a mandarin style), and the magazine where he gets his start, The New Terrain, has certain similarities to The New Republic.
Sometimes, in the almost incontinent welter of names and allusions that has always characterised Steiner's high-mandarin style, it is hard to discern how his theme is developed, beyond an endless and glittering array of exempla.
Recent acquisitions include a velveteen Pucci jacket with a mandala pattern in surprisingly un-Pucci-esque shades of blue and mushroom ($795); and, "the most expensive thing in the store," a long mandarin-style coat from one of Calvin Klein's first collections ($950).
In terms of critical reception, Revenge of an Actress was a "family melodrama" written in the style of Mandarin-ducks-and-butterfly romances that were sympathetic to the idea of free love in a time when arranged marriage was still a common practice (L. Wang 27).
So I threw on a pair of silk pyjamas – the shimmery Mandarin-style kind – that I'd bought at a street market in Yangshuo for $18.
