Piloting his tinny little car west out of Oxford with blithe disregard for the rules of the road, he declined to specify their destination - beyond the fact that it was where Morpurgo had met with his accident - and instead treated Harry to a detailed account of the death of Ramsey Everett, an account which he had previously given Heather, almost, it seemed, word for word.
It is no surprise that Senator Heffernan does not think the Australian Wheat Board has done
anything wrong by greasing Saddam Hussein’s palm to the tune of $300 million. A blithe acceptance of obscene behaviour like this fits perfectly with Senator Heffernan’s and the Howard government’s complete rejection of the norms of civilised society.
By a nice coincidence, the closing work of the Bolshoi's season is Ratmansky's blithe and funny recreation of Fyodor Lopukhov's The Bright Stream.
Judith Mackrell, The Guardian, 11 August 2007. Guardian
We also learn that Shelley originally wrote, "Hail to thee blithe spirit / Bird thou hardly art" - thus avoiding the wincing "never wert" that has convulsed generations of schoolchildren.
Richard Holmes, The Guardian, 21 July 2007, Guardian
reviewing Anne Wroe's Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself. Amazon
His novel has many voices: Sarah’s taut blithe fluency, that of an upper-class intellectual; Slater’s bluff, irresistibly British effrontery; Chubb’s defensive meander punctuated with Australian and Malay expressions; Mulaha’s elaborate courtesies; a Chinese-Malaysian woman’s aggressively fractured English - all without benefit of quotation marks.
John Updike, The New Yorker, 24 November 2003, The New Yorker
reviewing Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake. Amazon