most ironical

"This is the most ironical part of India's growth. The middle classes are demanding cheap, docile labour," he says.

He was about to enter, when fortunately he perceived two waiters looking at him over the back screen of the window with a most ironical expression, and he sheered off at once.

Then the prison governor asked me for whom I wished to mourn, and this in a most ironical manner.

Thomas Mann is one of the most ironical of novelists, and his irony persists even when he deals in luminous prose with moral and religious problems.

Yet both the frequency with which such passages recur, and the earnestness of their tone even when they seem most ironical, leave no doubt that, like Thucydides, he was not indifferent to these questions, although ‘perplexed in the extreme’ by the apparent absence, or at least uncertainty, of any steadfast moral order in the award of happiness and calamity to men.