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 Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 11:39 am Post subject: |
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Tales from the Drones Club
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | 'I mean to say,' resumed the Crumpet, 'if Freddie - with the best motives in the world - hadn't carried that suitcase for that girl, he might at this moment be walking up the aisle with a gardenia in his buttonhole and Mavis Peasemarch, only daughter of the fifth Earl of Bodsham, on his arm.'
The Bean demurred. He refused to admit the possibility of such a thing, even if Freddie Widgeon had sworn off suitcases for life.
'Old Bodders would never have allowed Mavis to marry a bird of Freddie's calibre. He would think him worldly and frivolous. I don't know if you are personally acquainted with the Bod, but I may tell you that my people once lugged me to a weekend at his place and not only were we scooped in and shanghaied to church twice on the Sunday, regardless of age or sex, but on the Monday morning at eight o' clock- eight, mark you - there were family prayers in the dining room. There you have old Bodders in a nutshell. Freddie's a good chap, but he can't have stood a dog's chance from the start.' (From Fate at p. 8) |
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| Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 4:11 pm Post subject: |
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New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Goodbye, Columbus
When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?
By Jill Lepore
| Quote: | Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washinton (see Fleeing the Founding Father by Cassandra Pybus March 16/06) was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master's horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore's proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. "There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make the escape," a cousin of Washington's from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, "Liberty is sweet." In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore's all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto, "Liberty to Slaves." Liberty may not have been as sweet as he'd hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to "Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets." The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him.
No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore's regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.)
... (It was at (George) Washington's insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the "Book of Negroes," so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats' raised bayonets, jump off the wharves and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.
But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it... (-- pgs. 74-75) |
Documentation reveals that George Washington's false teeth were so ill-fitted they pained him frequently and horribly.
Cool!
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| Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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The Rainmaker
DVD
| Quote: | Claims auditor forced to resign to avoid having her testimony heard: I took the cash and I also signed a letter saying I would never discuss any of my claim files with anybody.
Legal Rookie Rudy Baylor: Including the Black file?
CA: Specifically the Black file.
Rudy: So you knew that claim should have been paid.
CA: Everybody knew. But the company was playing the odds.
Rudy: What odds?
CA: The odds that the insured would not consult a lawyer.
Later on while the jury deliberates:
Deck Shiffler (Rudy's partner): Great Benefit's like a bad slot machine - never pays off. |
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 9:55 am Post subject: |
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Mao Zedong
Hardcover
By Johnathan Spence
| Quote: | In the spring of 1927 it all came crashing down. The labor unions in Shanghai were gutted first, in April, by Chiang Kai-shek and his allies among the warlords, who had all grown alarmed over the mounting power of the Communist Party. Working with local secret-society and criminal organizations, and with the open connivance of the Westerners in the international concessions, Chiang ordered a roundup of Communists and labor leaders. Thousands were killed and the Communist movement in the city was almost wiped out. Communist theorists in the Comintern, and Stalin himself, claimed that the terror was a positive development, since it "proved" that the right wing of the Guomindang had shown its counnterrevolutionary nature; they insisted, however, that the Chinese Communists continued to work with the "left" wing of the Guomindang, which was based in the industrial tri-city area of Wuhan, inland up the Yangtze. After leaving Changsha, Mao was sent to Wuhan so he could continue working in his capacity as an alternate member of the Guomindang Central Committee; and in an attempt to placate the left Guomindang, the Communist Central Committee ordered Mao to dampen the enthusiasm of the peasant masses he had just been writing so enthusiastically about. By midsummer of 1927, the Wuhan Guomindang leaders had decided to throw in their lot with Chiang Kai-shek and abandon the Communists. At this stage, a new wave of terror and repression of the Communists took place in the Wuhan region, and against the peasant associations there and in Human. It was in this grim situation that the Communist Party Central Committee - again reacting to orders from Stalin and the Comintern - ordered Mao to re-fan the flames of peasant insurrection, so as to move the revolution to a higher stage.
Not surprisingly, Mao found the task inpossible. In his excited Hunan report of February 1927 he had tallied up a total of 1,367,727 members of the peasant associations in the province of Hunan alone. Now, in August 1927, away from the base area he knew best, and in the midst of massive military repression, Mao could raise only a few thousand followers. Most of them were killed or routed by local militarists after brief campaigns. (From Chapter 6 at pgs. 73-74) |
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 10:59 am Post subject: |
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The Irish Times
Why the Chinese can't be like the Americans
China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation
Hardcover
By James Kynge
Reviewed by Clifford Coonan
May 6/06
| Quote: | China Shakes the World is a business book, but one with a strongly beating human heart, and it's a splendid introduction to what is happening in, and to, China today. What Kynge brings to the subject is a real passion fuelled by his years living there, which has also given him a depth and sophistication that few other China books can match.
The book is too short, and you feel Kynge has a lot more to say on the subject, but its brevity makes for an easy read. Kynge loves the people.
He had real sympathy for the Chinese, who want the same that Americans and Europeans want - a car, a house, education for their kids and access to consumer goods. But he acknowledges that the sheer numbers involved means this is impossible: "The chances that the Chinese will one day be able to consume at the same rate as Americans do today are close to zero..."the world does not have the resources to cater for 1.3 billion Chinese behaving like Americans," he writes. (From the excellent Book Reviews section beginning at p. 10) |
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| Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 9:36 am Post subject: |
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From Favorite French Gambles:
Joan of Arc
Hardcover
By Mary Gordon
| Quote: | | At first, she seemed to take the Burgundians by surprise. She approached the field on a light-dapple-gray horse, "very beautiful and fiery (footnote omitted). Her standards were flying. She had the bells rung. The first rush brought Joan into the Burgundian camp, where the soldiers were mostly disarmed and resting. She was lucky for a time, but only for a time. From a hilltop, the daunting Burgundian captian Jean de Luxembourg spotted Joan and had time to order his troops to meet her. Despite this, Joan, desperately and perhaps foolishly, made two further assaults, with at least some success. But then Luxembourg's men were joined by the duke of Burgundy's and the English. Her followers begged her to retreat to Compiegne, and she responded with anger. "Their discomfiture depends only on you. Think of falling on them." (footnote omitted) It was the sort of challenge to which her men would have risen in the past, but she could not rally them now; either her authority had dissipated or the odds really were impossible. (-- pgs. 78-79) |
| Quote: | Cauchon was a formalist; he loved the form and took pride in his adherence to its lineaments, his obedience to its demands. It was necessary that he appoint the required officials, the most important of whom was called "the promoter." In our terms he was the prosecutor. Cauchon named Jean d'Estivet, who had served as his canon at Beauvais. D'Estivet was especially noted for his ferocity and partisanship. He was notorious in his dislike of Joan for his foul mouth, which was so offensive that even Warwick was shocked. At one point, he disguised himself as a friendly priest and visited her in her cell. It was he, even more than Cauchon, who baited and tauynted Joan, and even more than Cauchon, he felt the edge of her sharp tongue.
By the time he was ready to begin, Cauchon had assembled one cardinal, six biships, thirty-two doctors of theology, sixteen bachelors of theology, seven doctors of medicine, and one hundred other clerical associates. Joan had no one on her side but herself. (--pgs. 104-105) |
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| Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 9:36 am Post subject: |
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The Irish Times
Segregation wall strangles the life out of Bethlehem
City is now Palestinian ghetto and subject to Israeli checkpoints
Opinion & Analysis
By John Kelly, Professor emeritus and former Registrar of University College Dublin
June 24/06
| Quote: | Right across the West Bank, the route of the wall deviates from the internationally accepted pre-1967 borders, known as the Green Line, in many cases cutting Palestinian farmers off from their farms so that at this moment, thousands of tonnes of citrus fruits and olives are unattended and destined to rot later this summer.
One example, out of many hundreds of similar ones, tells the sad story of an elderly farmer whose home is some 60 m across the road from his olive tree farm. But with the construction of the wall right on his doorstep, he now has to travel 22km over dirt roads to get to it. More often than not, he is not permitted to get through the Israeli checkpoint.
As always when that happens, no reason is given. It would appear that the instructions given to the Israeli guards on these checkpoints are simply to humiliate the Palestinians and make life as awkward for them as they can. Farming is the main source of income for the Palestinians along the fertile route of the wall, and separation from their farms and the lack of mobility is causing enormous hardship.
... Despite a number of UN resolutions, the Oslo 1 and 2 agreements, the Sharm-El-Sheikh agreement (see BBC News report, The Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, of Oct. 17/00), and just recently the agreement on movement and access (see the 36-page report by the World Bank Technical Team of Dec. 2/05), brokered by James Wolfensohn after the Gaza disengagement of last autumn, the Israeli government gives them all the two-finger salute, and proceeds with the building of its monstrous settlements and now this segregation wall, further and further into the Palestinian lands.
Agreed borders are totally ignored. And just recently, along with the US, and lately the EU, the Israeli government expressed its surprise and criticism at the results of the democratic elections which elected the so-called terrorist party, Hamas.
It beggars belief that prime minister Ehud Olmert, standing alongside George Bush on the steps of the White House on May 23rd, appealed to the Palestinian people to engage in peace talks while at that very moment, his troops are throwing them out of their homes, destroying their livelihood and treating them like animals.
His appeal is all the more outrageous since, despite becoming prime minister almost six months ago, Mr. Olmert has made no attempt whatsoever to engage in dialogue, or even meet, the very moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. (-- p. 15) |
Related story of impossible odds in the Israeli war on Lebanon:
| Quote: | The tour was organized so that journalists could meet representatives of the government and the Israeli defences forces; unfortunately, though, there were to no meetings with anyone who might have a critical view of Israeli actions.
Such people, however, can be found on the streets of Tel Aviv. There, one finds little opposition to the military action itself but some anxiety about its duration. Tel Aviv is hardly touched by the war being waged just 50 km to the north, and a protest rally draws a crowd of less than 3,000. The army is not in evidence at all, beaches are full, shops are bustling, and the traffic is terrible. Three of the students taking part in the rally admit to me that opposition is largely limited to left-wing students, communists and - rely on Israel for contrasts - some ultra-orthodox religious. But, they argue, the longer the war drags on, especially as casualties and economic damage accululate, their numbers will grow. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's daughter, they point out with some satisfaction, was among the protesters. (Excerpt from At war and fighting a PR battle, Israel's leaders feel their actions are not being accurately reported in the West, but they refuse to acknowledge the suffering of the Lebanese and the resilience of Hizbullah, reports Eoin McVey from Haifa and Tel Aviv, in the Irish Times, July 29 at p. 3 of News Features). |
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| Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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Back from the Dead
One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked Off America's Death Row
Hardcover
By Joan Cheever
| Quote: | | In the summer of 1972, the unthinkable happened in the United States. The death penalty was abolished. Voting five to four in a case called Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional because it was, among other things, "racist, arbitrary, unfairly applied, wanton and freakish, curel and unusual." Four years later the death penalty was reinstated, but during that interval the killing chambers across America remained empty and 589 inmates awaiting execution were given a second chance to live. 322 members of that group were released when when they completed their sentences or became eligible for parole. |
On witnessing the 1994 execution by lethal injection of her client of nine years, convicted killer Walter Key Williams:
| Quote: | "I had to see what this country does in the dark of night when it commits the most premeditated kind of murder that exists," she explains. "When I talk about the death penalty it's not theoretical." Walter's execution prompted Cheever to track down the 589 prisoners who "represent the largest unexamined social experiment in U.S. criminal history." They, she believed, had "the answer one of the most troubling and controversial questions in the debate on the death penalty. Can convicted killers be rehabilitated? Will they kill again?"
Back From the Dead: One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked Off America's Death Row answers those questions not with rhetoric but with facts. Cheever interviewed more than 125 of the approximately 250 'lottery winners' who are still alive and out of prison, and she kept track of all 589 for eight years (164 Furman prisoners were never released either because their crimes were too heinous or because they re-offended in prison). (From the story, Stay of execution, by Anna Mundow in the Irish Times July 29/06 at p. 10 of the Magazine). |
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| Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 3:46 pm Post subject: |
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The Irish Times
Posh English-language Daily
Women fail to win any seats in Kuwaiti election
By Haitham Haddadin in Kuwait
July 1/06
| Quote: | Powerful Islamist and reformist candidates swept Kuwait's election but women failed to win a single seat in their first attempt to run for parliament, results showed yesterday.
Analysts and newspapers said a strong showing by the opposition - a loose coalition of pro-reform ex-MPs, Islamists, leftists and liberals - raises the possibility of deeper tension between the new assembly and the government.
..."Women failed us," said Zikra al-Majdali, a 39-year-old lawyer who ran in an ultra-conservative Islamist area, referring to hopes among female candidates that women - voting for the first time - would help elect at least one of them. (Opening paragraphs, p. 9) |
See also, Reformists sweep vote in Kuwait, June 30/06 at Reuters:
| Quote: | None of the 28 women among a total of 249 candidates won a seat, even though women make up 57 percent of the Arab Gulf state's 340,000 eligible voters.
Women won the right to run for office and to vote in May 2005. Overall turnout was heavy, at 65 percent, but only 35 percent of those voters were women, state media reported. |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 12:28 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Talk of the Town
Hearts and Brains
By Hendrik Herzberg
Nov. 6/06
| Quote: | | In a normal democracy, given the state of public opinion and the record of the incumbent government, it would be taken for granted that come next Tuesday the ruling party would be turned out. But, for reasons that have less to do with the wizardry of Karl Rove than with the structural biases of America's electoral machinery, Democrats enter every race carrying a bag of sand. The Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent fewer Americans than do its forty-five Democrats. On the House side, Democratic candidates have a higher propportion of the average district vote than Republicans in four of the five biennial elections since 1994, but - thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and demographics - Republicans remain in the majority. To win back the House, Democrats need something close to a landslide. Their opponents, to judge from their behavior, seem to think they might get one. (-- pgs. 45-48) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:53 am Post subject: |
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*Performing Flea
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | I'm so glad you liked Money in the Bank. The only novel, I should imagine, that has ever been written in an internment camp. I did it at a rate of about a page a day in a room with over fifty men playing cards and ping-pong and talking and singing. The first twelve chapters were written in a whirl of ping-pong balls. I suppose on an average morning I would get from fifteen to twenty on the side of the head just as I was searching for the mot juste.
As I was starting Chapter Thiorteen the Library was opened and I was made President. The President of a Camp Library must not be confused with the Librarian. The Librarian does the rough work like handing out books and entering them in a ledger. The President presides. He stimulates ad encourages. I, for instance, used to look in once a day and say "Everything okay?" and go away again. It was amazing how it helped. Giving the Wodehouse Touch, I used to call it.
Being President of the Library, I became entitled to a padded cell all to myself, and I wrote the rest of the book in a peaceful seclusion disturbed only by the sound of musical gentlemen practising trombones, violoncellos, etc., next door, in the interests of the Entertainment Committee and somebody else lecturing on Chaucer or Beowulf (under the auspices of the Committee for Education). All that I know of Beowulf today I owe to these lectures.
After I had finished Money in the Bank, I started a Blandings Castle novel called Full Moon and had done about a third of it when I was released. Ethel then joined me i the country, bringing with here the Jeeves novel called Joy in the Morning, which I had written at Le Touquet during the occupation. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse from Berlin dated May 11/42, at pgs. 112-113) |
| Quote: | Money in the Bank
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
With Foreward and Note by Plum pal W. Townend
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Oh, yes, and get this:
| Quote: | Uncle Dynamite
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | | I have been plugging away at Uncle Dynamite. I managed to get a hundred pages done while in the clinic, in spite of constant interruptions. I would start writing at nine in the morning and get a paragraph done when the nurse would come in and sluice water all over the floor. Then the concierge arrived with the morning paper, then the nurse with bread for lunch, then another nurse with wine, then a doctor and finally a couple of Inspecteurs. All the Inspecteurs were very interested in my writing. It was the same thing in camp, where I used to sit on my typewriter case with the machine balanced on a suitcase and work away with two German soldiers standing behind me with rifles, breathing down the back of my neck. They seemed fascinated by the glimpse into the life literary. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse at the Hotel Lincoln, Paris, dated Feb. 5/45, at pg. 120) |
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On the increasingly restrictive editorial policy of U.S. magazines:
| Quote: | It must be quite a job, though, writing anything for the American magazines these days. Here is a cautionary manifesto which one of them has sent out to its contributors. The editor says he won't consider any of the following:
Stories about gangsters, politics, regional problems. Stories with historical settings. Military stories, World War Two. Stories with a college background. Sex stories. Stories with smart-alec dialogue. Stories in which characters drink. Stories with a newspaper background. Dialiect stories. Stories about writers or editors or advertising men. radio stories. Stories about religion. Stories concerning insanity. Crime stories. Mistaken identity stories. Stories of the First World War. Stories about adolescent characters.
Apart from that, you're as free as the birds in the tree tops and can write anything you like. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse Nov. 11, 1946 from Pavillon Henri Quatre, St. Germain-en-Laye, at pg. 142) |
* A word about the title:
| Quote: | | With Sean O'Casey's statement that I am "English literature's performing flea," I scarcely know how to deal. Thinking it over, I believe he meant to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper. (From the chapter entitled, Huy Day by Day, at p. 217) |
That would be Sean O'Casey, an Irish playwright of comparatively little consequence, best remembered for romanticizing the co-dependent relationship between a mean-mouthed drunken pugilist and his abused wife too punch-drunk to leave in Juno and the Paycock.
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| Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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The Globe and Mail
Inferior daily trumpet in Frostback country
Israeli offers $1-billion for peace
By Luke Baker, Jerusalem
Dec. 7/06
p. A3
| Quote: | An Israeli businessman is offering the Palestinian prime minister $1-billion if he and his Israeli counterpart can sit down and reach a peace agreement.
An initial instalment of $100-million would be made if Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the Islamist militant group Hamas, and Israel's Ehud Olmert can just manage to start talking. But odds on the initiative succeeding would appear to be slim. Hamas advocates the Jewish state's destruction and Israel regards the movement as terrorist.
Billionaire businessman Avi Shaked, who made his fortune running Internet gambling sites, says he has lined up a consortium of international financiers who are ready to inject the money immediately if a deal is struck.
"The killing must be stopped," Mr. Shaked said in an interview yesterday, explaining a plan that he says even has the approval of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mr. Shaked, 53, a supporter of Israel's centre-left Labour Party who has launched peace initiatives in the past, says his proposal could help create as many as a million jobs in the Palestinian territories.
He wants to bring the Palestinian economy up to Israel's standards, putting the sides on a level footing and doing away with the poverty that helps fuel the conflict. |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2006 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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From Hosers, eh?
cbc.ca/news
Sports lotto millionaires beat the taxman
Dec. 21/06
| Quote: | Two brothers who made millions playing sports lotteries won't have to give Revenue Canada a piece of their winnings.
In a decision issued Thursday in Ottawa, Tax Court Chief Justice Don Bowman ruled the multi-million-dollar fortune Brian and Terry Leblanc accrued by playing sports lotteries may defy explanation, but it was exempt from taxation.
Revenue Canada had claimed the brothers, former window-washers, had somehow found a way to beat the system, and demanded they be taxed as a business. "Good for them, but it's time that they coughed up a part of that so that the rest of the people of Canada don't have to carry the burden that they're presenting," Revenue Canada lawyer Roger Leclerc argued.
The LeBlancs' lawyer responded that betting on sports lotteries is too risky to be considered a business, and winnings are tax exempt, no matter how many times you hit the jackpot.
"There's no tax on luck," Bill Vanveen told CBC Radio's Teddy Katz. (emphasis added)
The brothers said they used a computer to help see what kind of combinations would earn them a big pay day. But in the end, they said, their bets came down to pure guesses.
The Leblancs also told the court they lived frugally — even after they started winning — and spent $200,000 to $300,000 per week on sports lotteries across Canada. At one point they had 15 people buying tickets for them. It paid off for the brothers, whom Justice Bowman called compulsive gamblers, with lottery wins all over the country. |
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| Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 11:13 am Post subject: |
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Rumpole and the Reign of Terror
Hardcover
By Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | Of course,' I agreed. 'That's why I felt I had to promise some further activity. But what exactly?'
'If you could persuade the Home Secretary...'Bernard had downed another glass of Pommeroy's Very Ordinary and was, I thought, letting his imagination run riot.
'Me? Persuade...You know who the Home Secretary is, don't you? The Right Honourable Fred, don't you dare call him Frederick, Sugden. The man who has announced he distrusts all lawyers, including judges. The working-class Fred from the back streets of Bristol who made his way up through Reading University to the top ranks of the Labour Party. The friendly statesman who abolished the hearsay rules and allowed the police to impose fines without the necessity of a trial. The statesman who apparently believes Magna Carta should be banned as an obscene publication? I've got about as much chance of persuading him as I have of becoming Lord High Chancellor of England.' (From Chapter 16 at pg. 78) |
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Last edited by editor on Fri Jun 05, 2009 12:39 pm; edited 7 times in total |
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editor
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Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:43 am Post subject: |
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Rumpole Rests His Case
Hardcover
By Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | 'What have you done, exactly?'
'Only got shot up so badly I had to have two hours on the operating table. Only got pumped as full of lead as a fucking pencil. And for getting that done to me, I'll probably get four years. That's what they tell me my brief's thinking of, four to five, he reckons. That's my youth gone, all that's left of it.'
'Who's this brief you speak of?'
'It's a Mr Erskine-Brown QC. He's a senior man.'
'QC? I've always thought those letters stand for "Queer Customer". If you've got Claude defending you, you might as well plead guilty. He'll probably do you a very nice plea in mitigation.' As soon as I'd said that I regretted it. It wasn't worthy of me. The onset of death, I thought, brings out the worst in you.
'I'm joking of course,' I told him. 'Claude Erskine-Brown is a man of considerable experience.' And I restrained myself from adding, 'Of opera.' (From the title story at p. 189) |
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Last edited by editor on Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:16 am; edited 2 times in total |
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