Word: arbuthnots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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John Toye (Arbuthnot), and John McDonnell (Cornwallis) were the only others who managed to create characters; the common soldiers played their scenes with extraordinary aplomb. George Hamlin tried hard to make something of Washington, but with the lines he had it was hopeless...
...Greenmantle, for instance, another Hannay pal called Sandy Arbuthnot spurns the passionate advances of a fetching but fell lady spy named Hilda von Einem. "You must know, Madam," he says as bullets whiz about them, "that I am a British officer." Nowadays such behavior is hopelessly out of all fashion, literary and otherwise...
...fictional device is 16 pages of gamy verses, supposedly in Burns's own handwriting and sewn into a copy of The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the notorious anthology that the poet made to amuse his drinking companions). Max Arbuthnot, a goatish old Edinburgh lawyer with a fondness for '27 port and women of about the same vintage, undertakes to sell the smoldering and hitherto unknown holograph for his impoverished sister. He shows it to a fey, gloomy poet nicknamed Yacky Doo, who amuses himself alternately with a beckoning death wish and with Arbuthnot's married daughter...
...lover's quarrel with Yacky Doo. Pettishly she steals the priceless Burns manuscript, then gets drunk and loses it-or so it appears. Soon, throughout Edinburgh, copies of the verses are falling like fig leaves. The barometer of conventional morality falls dangerously too. Everyone burns but few marry; Arbuthnot himself corners a young wench in his office, and clerks on the floor below watch anxiously as plaster flakes off the ceiling...